Multi-Touch for Windows, without expensive hardware, Now! – All you need is a webcam and an idea…

Microsoft Office Labs - Touchless - A webcam multi-touch SDK

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That brings us to today, releasing Touchless to the world outside Microsoft, as a *FREE* *OPEN-SOURCE* SDK with a low barrier to entry for developers and users. Touchless makes developing multi-touch capable software easy, and the results can be enjoyed by anyone with a webcam (and some M&Ms :))! Touchless has come a long way, but its journey has just begun. I can imagine a variety of great directions to explore using Touchless. Perhaps support for the forthcoming Windows multi-touch API, video chat white-boarding, implementing mouse/game/hotkey/media control, and designing decked out Minority Report style file/media browsers.

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CodePlex - Touchless SDK

“What is Touchless?

The Touchless SDK enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input. Touch without touching.

Touchless started as Mike Wasserman’s college project at Columbia University. The main idea: to offer users a new and cheap way of experiencing multi-touch capabilities, without the need of expensive hardware or software. All the user needs is a camera, which will track colored markers defined by the user.

Mike presented the project at the Microsoft Office Labs Productivity Science Fair, Office Labs fell in love with it, and Touchless was chosen as a Community Project. Our deliverables include an extensible demo application to showcase a limited set of multi-touch capabilities, but mainly we are delivering an SDK to allow users to build their own multi-touch applications.

Now, Touchless is released free and open-source to the world under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) on CodePlex. Our goals are to drive community involvement and use of the SDK as it continues to develop.

Remember that this is just the beginning; and you're invited to join our journey. Send us your questions and feedback, use Touchless SDK in your .NET applications and XNA games, and support the community by contributing to the source code.

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That sounds pretty darn cool. I want to wave my hands and/or stuff around in the air in front of my PC and have stuff happen! Let’s see, I wonder if I could code up a single finger salute into an automated IM/Tweet response? :o

Now if only I can a webcam that I could get to would work on my dev/vista box… :/