Minamo Water-based Touch Interface

If you think that the usual touchpads are too boring for you to navigate the mouse on your computer display, what about a tank of water? This water-based touchscreen project uses a tank of water, light, webcam and an LCD to create a rather interesting touch input device. It’s dubbed the Minamo interface, which means “surface of water” in Japanese. It relies on a webcam as well as a cleverly written piece of software to turn the water’s surface into an unorthodox way of playing out a touchscreen interface. It does so using some pixie dust and plenty of magic – we jest, the webcam will snap a photo of the surface of the water from the lower side, and only when the finger has invaded the water. Following that, a color tracking system on Max/MSP+Jitter finds coordinates where the finger appears while producing a cursor move and click in return. Any image distortion will be adjusted by affine transformation. Pretty neat, eh? Check out a video of it in action after the jump.