The Microsoft Surface is a table-sized multi-user multitouch device.

Multitouch computer interfaces are a curiosity currently explored by many hardware manufacturers and home experimenters. Products like the iPhone and the Microsoft Surface will bring the technology to a whole new group of users in the upcoming years, and in order to get ahead of the curve and understand how this technology works, we will look into the internals of it here, and describe how it works in detail.

Prerequisites

This book will require that you have at least a rudimentary understanding of signal processing, and are competent in a programming language of your choice. This book will use pseudo-code to describe all of the algorithms and processes necessary to understand how this technology works, but to make it useful you will need to implement it in your own language.

To do the image processing components, you will need a digital web camera, or a multi-touch surface of your own devising (for the fearless). We will try to stay away from the mathematical descriptions of the algorithms whenever possible (as the pseudocode should be easier to understand from a programmer's/implementer's point of view, however this is a Wiki Book, and if you can contribute material to the pure mathematical point of view, please feel free to do so.

Table of Contents

This article is issued from Wikibooks. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.