A genius way to turn MacBook Pro into touch compliant with just 100 yen

Many people have the desire to "touch and operate a MacBook like an iPad". Although Apple is not interested, it is a touch operation of a dreamlike MacBook Pro, but engineers who have made dreams possible by only about 1 dollar (about 110 yen) material cost are appearing.

Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $ 1 of Hardware · cat / var / log / life
https://www.anishathalye.com/2018/04/03/macbook-touchscreen/

Studying as a postdoct by MIT who fulfilled the dream of some Mac usersAnish AthalyeMr,Kevin KwokMr,Guillermo WebsterMr,Logan EngstromThey are four engineers. It seems that the touch operation on the MacBook Pro was achieved in 16 hours from the idea.

The basic idea is to use the glossy display of the MacBook with high reflectance to detect the finger that appears on the display with the camera and read what part of the display it points. This idea is thought to be when Mr. Kwok is a junior high school student, and it seems that it is based on what was already implemented as a system using an external camera.


Furthermore, to distinguish between the "Hover" mode of moving the mouse cursor and the "Touch" mode touching the screen, we use the gap between the reflected finger and the reflected finger.


Four people decided to use a front camera of MacBook Pro instead of an external camera and decided to make it a touch panel decided to attach a mirror to the front camera and reflect the movement of the finger.


The mirror attached at a 45 degree angle to the display surface was made from disposable paper plates, clips, hot bonds, and the material cost is less than 1 dollar (about 110 yen).


Processing first detects real fingers and reflected fingers from skin color and contours, and reads the display and vertical motion. Measure the distance between the contours of each finger, it is a simple thing to distinguish it as Touch if the distance becomes short and the contours overlap each other, otherwise it is distinguished as a hover where the finger moves.


And it said that the work of mapping the coordinates of Hover / Touch read by the front camera to the coordinates of the display was done.RANSACIt is said that the position is being corrected by using the mathematical model of. By assigning the movement of the finger to the operation of the mouse cursor in this way, touch operation is enabled.


The state of the touch operation completed after 16 hours can be confirmed with the movie (about 2.9 MB) played by clicking the following image.