Wonderful Engineering

This $1 Gadget Can Turn Your MacBook Display Into A Touchscreen

Have you ever thought about adding a touchscreen to your MacBook but always shied away from the idea, thinking that it would cost a lot or be too intricate? If yes, then you need to think again! Sistine Chapel is the name given to a particular idea by a group of four friends.

The four friends are Anish Athalye, Logan Engstrom, Guillermo Webster, and Kevin Kwok. They bought hardware worth $1 and created their proof-of-concept known as the Sistine Chapel. What is it? It is a touchscreen transformation for your Mac. It took the team only 16 hours from start to finish for creating their touchscreen.

Sistine Chapel kicked off with the simple idea of adding a small mirror next to the built-in webcam of Mac so that the camera would end up looking directly down at an angle towards the screen instead of looking at the user. The camera would then observe fingers that were hovering over the screen or touching it. The team would then create a translatable video feed that would utilize touch events by making use of the computer vision. The team sure makes the Sistine Chapel sound effortless.

The only hardware that was bought included a small mirror, a door hinge, hot glue, and a rigid paper plate. Surprisingly enough, all of this hardware will prove enough to get the Sistine Chapel working. The camera basically looks down at the screen and determines whether or not a finger is touching the screen or hovering over it. The final touches for the Sistine Chapel were mapping and calibrating. The team worked in collaboration for inputting the mapping of the touch/hover points that the webcam was identifying and transformed them into on-screen coordinates.

You can check out the final product below. The team is trying to introduce a higher resolution camera into the mix along with a curved mirror in order to enhance the touchscreen. What do you think of this amazing project? Do let us know!