Greetings, wise fans of Touchless! I’m Mike Wasserman, creator of this webcam multi-touch SDK. I get a huge kick out of solving coding problems, especially when some relatively simple code can unleash a lot of power from ordinary webcams. Touchless enables multi-touch by using a webcam to track colored objects, which means touch without touching. I’d like to tell my story of working on Touchless and fill you in on the road leading up to this public release.

I’m a work force rookie who joined Microsoft after graduating from Columbia University just over a year ago. By day I code features and tackle bugs for Microsoft Office. But outside of my vital duties to Office, I spend some spare time working on my side project. Touchless is the continuation of one of my undergrad projects at Columbia. The original demo let the user transform simple shapes and draw with two markers. Even after joining the working world Touchless stayed in my mental periphery. I just couldn’t put a stop to my continuing passions for human-computer interaction, augmented reality, and computer vision. Also, despite the growing success and adoption of multi-touch technology (think MS Surface and iPhone), there is still a huge potential to reach a wider base of home users.

Working at Microsoft is great because we get peeks into Microsoft Research projects, and lots of my peers have similar creative outlets and nerdy passions. I rewrote my project using XNA for Microsoft Office Labs’ Productivity Science Fair and demonstrated it for a lot of people, including Andy Wilson (the brilliant mind behind Microsoft Surface). Some laughed at the goofy little marker pellets on my fingers but they still saw value in the project. Office Labs Community Projects soon thereafter expressed interest in helping me release the project as an SDK. I gladly accepted their support and direction (huge props to Gary Caldwell and intern extraordinaire Isabel Mattos) and intensified my own efforts. All that work has already paid off. At the next fair Touchless was voted by attendees as “most interesting project.” You really should have seen how much this little kid enjoyed playing with M&Ms to control the drawing and pong demos. I even caught the attention of Chris Pratley (General Manager of Office Labs) and even Stephen Elop (President of Microsoft Business Division)!

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.

Now what?
Watch the video

Try the demo
Create your own Touchless Applications

Discuss it all here

Check out other Office Labs projects

Unleash the power of your webcam!

- Mike Wasserman