I’ve been looking into different ways of interacting with my game again today and found a neat little tutorial that shows how to make a homemade multitouch pad.

To get this to work you just need a box, some sort of clear glass or plastic, which you cover with paper and a webcam. You place the webcam in the box and then cover the box with the plastic wrapped in paper. You then need to install the software from here, calibrate it and then you have a working multitouch pad.

I didn’t have any boxes at hand that were the right size or any plastic for the surface so I sort of winged it a bit and made do with what I could find laying around. Surprisingly it worked. It’s a little buggy due to the fact that I don’t have everything put together perfectly but this could work as a nice controller with a bit more tinkering.

What I like about this is that you interact by touching paper. This helps it all feel more consistent when playing in the book. The box at the moment is still quite large but if I were to either work out a way to make it smaller or figure out how I could build it into a desk so the size of the box was hidden, I think it could work really well.

My box also has a face… it does not look amused.