title: Open Source optical touchscreen software for Windows
body: <p>For quite some time I've been looking into using a camera pointed at a screen to make a touchscreen. I always liked the idea of using a Kinect or some other IR/3D camera to do so. Unfortunately it seems as though development of any "touchscreen for Kinect" projects has all but stopped since 2013.</p>
  
  <p>All I want to do is point a camera at a TV, run Windows (Windows 10 preferably) on the TV, and touch the TV like a giant iPad. No crazy 3D gesture nonsense, just the exact same functionality you'd get from a normal capacitive mult-touch capable touchscreen.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked into just about every touchscreen project I could find online, the popular ones being:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.touchlesstouch.com/" rel="nofollow">touchlesstouch</a></li>
  <li>Ludique's Kinect Bundle</li>
  <li>Ubi-Interactive, but I don't want to pay that much to use more than one finger at a time</li>
  <li><a href="http://openni.ru/" rel="nofollow">openni</a> Looked promising until it didn't let me download anything. Plus anything related to Primesense is automatically out since Apple bought them 2 years ago.</li>
  <li>Plus lots of random projects from MSDN or kinecthacks.com</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Basically anything that's still available to download doesn't compile or crashes the second it runs because who knows why.</p>
  
  <p>There's also annoyingly unhelpful things like <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/computing/137630-using-kinect-to-turn-any-surface-into-a-multi-user-multi-finger-touchscreen" rel="nofollow" title="this">this</a>, or <a href="http://www.covii.pt/guineapig/viihaptic-software/" rel="nofollow">this</a> that shows it can work, but is unavailable to the public.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried several hand-tracking solutions as well, nothing compiled or ran. If I could just get some hand tracking software working I'm sure I could figure out how to add touchscreen functionality to it.</p>
  
  <p>I'm pretty well versed in C++, and have used Python before, but never anything with object detection. I have no idea where I'd even start with something like hand detection.  I've made another question asking how I'd get started building the software from the ground up myself.</p>
  
  <p>So is my only option to either pay Ubi-Interactive, or to write my own software? Are there still middleware libraries that would make that a little less daunting a task to undertake? </p>