Touchless SDK Released to CodePlex -- Visual Studio Magazine

Touchless SDK Released to CodePlex

SDK of Touchless, which allows use of a webcam as a graphical input device, is now available for download on CodePlex.

By Jeffrey Schwartz
11/01/2008

Software that started as a project by a Columbia University computer science student to eliminate the need for multiple hardware-based touch interfaces is now available for download on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

The Touchless SDK (available here) was designed by Michael Wasserman -- now a member of Microsoft's Office 14 development team -- to let programmers use a webcam as a graphical input device. With the SDK the webcam can track the movement of a physical object defined by an individual. A video demonstrating the Touchless concept is available on the CodePlex site.

Wasserman says he first started work on the Touchless SDK while at Columbia, to offer an inexpensive means of allowing for multitouch functionality. After presenting his work at the Microsoft Office Labs Productivity Fair his concept was selected as a Community Project for publication on CodePlex.

Touchless SDK joins similar technologies available for testing, including software by CamTrax Technologies for gaming and an open source effort called Touchlib.

While Wasserman posted an extensible demo app to highlight a variety of multitouch capabilities using the SDK, he says Microsoft decided to look to the broader dev community to build their own touch apps.

"I'd love to see people produce their own applications, especially games," Wasserman said in an interview. But he added that he sees it having business productivity potential as well.

"There's a lot of interest in using this sort of technology for, say, tracking the contents of whiteboards during meetings," he said. "Perhaps even sharing virtual workspaces wherein two people could perhaps interact using a webcam to share more information than they would be able to by just typing."

Wasserman said there are no official plans yet to integrate the Touchless SDK into any commercial projects, though Windows 7 is expected to have an open API in the dev platform that will support multitouch interfaces.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

In .NET 9 Debut, Microsoft Focuses on .NET Aspire, AI

Microsoft shipped .NET 9 today with the dev team highlighting .NET Aspire and AI in a keynote and follow-on sessions of the livestreamed launch event.
Microsoft Intros 'Guided Chat Experience' for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio

Microsoft introduced a new guided chat experience within GitHub Copilot, aiming to make developer interactions with AI more natural and effective.
Microsoft's Open-Source Semantic Kernel AI Toolkit Extends to AWS Cloud

Microsoft announced its open-source Semantic Kernel toolkit for integrating advanced AI models into applications is now available on the Amazon Bedrock managed service.
Microsoft Previews Copilot AI in SQL Server Management Studio

In announcing SSMS 21 Preview 1 this week, Microsoft revealed Copilot AI for the tool is also being previewed, privately.
DBSCAN Clustering and Anomaly Detection Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of data clustering and anomaly detection using the DBSCAN (Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm. Compared to other anomaly detection systems based on data clustering, DBSCAN can find significantly different types of anomalies.