# Anish Athalye Home About Archive Projects © 2019. All rights reserved. 03 Apr 2018 · 4 min read — shared on Hacker News , Lobsters , Reddit , Twitter and Hackaday We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision. The proof-of-concept, dubbed “Project Sistine” after our recreation of the famous painting in the Sistine Chapel, was prototyped by me, Kevin , Guillermo , and Logan in about 16 hours. The basic principle behind Sistine is simple. Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection. Kevin, back in middle school, noticed this phenomenon and built ShinyTouch , utilizing an external webcam to build a touch input system requiring virtually no setup. We wanted to see if we could miniaturi...