It's a touch screen coffee table, like the Product Formerly Known as Microsoft Surface (PixelSense).
I have very little experience working with wood, so I picked the simplest design I could think of. The table is made from a series of 1x8 boards, a piece of 3/4" thick plywood, a bunch of 4" right angle brackets, and some 1/4" carriage bolts.
The TV is an old 40" HDTV I had lying around not being used. It's a few years old, so by modern standards it's very thick and heavy (a little over 5" deep, close to 50 pounds in weight).
The touch screen overlay is from Peau Productions. All of the touch detection is done through the frame, so the glass can be used as a plain table surface without worry.
This is all hooked up to an old desktop PC running Windows 8.
It will be mainly used to control an HTPC hooked up to a projector.
I just finished the build and haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but a few things I'm looking forward to trying out
- Two player air hockey
- Virtual Pinball
- Running an XBox 360 on the projector while using the table for SmartGlass
- Battlescreen for Battlefield 4
- Civ V
- Kerbal Space Program
- OneNote using a stylus
I might end up writing some media player software for this particular set up too.
Build
- Some of the starting materials
- Cutting the plywood
- Cutting the boards
- Testing the assembly of a corner using the brackets and carriage bolts on scraps
- Joining a leg to a short side
- First corner joined!
- Making the rest of the legs
- Test assembly of the frame
- Adding in the support slats
- Testing if the overlay still fits
- Disassembled and prepped for staining
- Staining, two coats
- Test reassembly after staining
- The touch screen overlay is 46"; the TV is 40". To cover the gap, I used some craft paper cut to size
- Final assembly
