Return to site

How To Activate Touch Screen On Macbook Air

broken image


03 Apr 2018 · 4 min read — shared on Hacker News (2), Lobsters, Reddit (2, 3), Twitter and Hackaday

We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a littlebit of computer vision. The proof-of-concept, dubbed 'Project Sistine' afterour recreation of the famous painting in the Sistine Chapel, was prototypedby me, Kevin, Guillermo, and Logan in about 16 hours.

The basic principle behind Sistine is simple. Surfaces viewed from an angletend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface bychecking 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 virtuallyno setup. We wanted to see if we could miniaturize the idea and make it workwithout an external webcam. Our idea was to retrofit a small mirror in front ofa MacBook's built-in webcam, so that the webcam would be looking down at thecomputer screen at a sharp angle. The camera would be able to see fingershovering over or touching the screen, and we'd be able to translate the videofeed into touch events using computer vision.

The jury still seems to be out on whether the new MacBook Pros with Touch Bar are a courageous leap forward or a desperate cry for help. But regardless of which side you're on, the price is. Use your favourite gestures and moves from the trackpad right on the screen. MacOS® operating system does not support touch like Windows 10 does, but with AirBar you can turn the screen into a big trackpad. With a quick software installation, you can use multi-touch gestures right on the screen of your Macbook Air 13.3. It was touch and go there for a while: The possibility of ever seeing a MacBook with touchscreen features seemed remote. But a new version of a computer accessory called the AirBar makes this a. If you ever wanted a touch-screen display on your MacBook Air then you might want to look into AirBar. AirBar Has Been Around for a While, But Now it Supports the 13-inch MacBook Air. The feature works on most trackpads built into relatively new MacBook Pro and Air models, including any with multitouch support. Turn On Tap To Click with Mac OS X Trackpad Preferences The best way for most users to enable touch tapping on their Mac is through System Preferences.

Our hardware setup was simple. All we needed was to position a mirror at theappropriate angle in front of the webcam. Here is our bill of materials:

  • Small mirror
  • Rigid paper plate
  • Door hinge
  • Hot glue

After some iteration, we settled on a design that could be assembled in minutesusing a knife and a hot glue gun.

Here's the finished product:

The first step in processing video frames is detecting the finger. Here's atypical example of what the webcam sees:

The finger detection algorithm needs to find the touch/hover point for furtherprocessing. Our current approach uses classical computer vision techniques. Theprocessing pipeline consists of the following steps:

  1. Filter for skin colors and binary threshold
  2. Find contours
  3. Find the two largest contours and ensure that the contours overlap in thehorizontal direction and the smaller one is above the larger one
  4. Identify the touch/hover point as the midpoint of the line connecting thetop of the bottom contour and the bottom of the top contour
  5. Distinguish between touch and hover based on the vertical distance betweenthe two contours

Shown above is the result of applying this process to a frame from the webcam.The finger and reflection (contours) are outlined in green, the bounding box isshown in red, and the touch point is shown in magenta.

The final step in processing the input is mapping the touch/hover point fromwebcam coordinates to on-screen coordinates. The two are related by ahomography. We compute the homography matrix through a calibration processwhere the user is prompted to touch specific points on the screen. After wecollect data matching webcam coordinates with on-screen coordinates, we canestimate the homography robustly using RANSAC. This gives us a projectionmatrix that maps webcam coordinates to on-screen coordinates.

The video above demonstrates the calibration process, where the user has tofollow a green dot around the screen. The video includes some debuginformation, overlaid on live video from the webcam. The touch point in webcamcoordinates is shown in magenta. After the calibration process is complete, theprojection matrix is visualized with red lines, and the software switches to amode where the estimated touch point is shown as a blue dot.

In the current prototype, we translate hover and touch into mouse events,making existing applications instantly touch-enabled.

If we were writing our own touch-enabled apps, we could directly make use oftouch data, including information such as hover height.

Project Sistine is a proof-of-concept that turns a laptop into a touchscreenusing only $1 of hardware, and for a prototype, it works pretty well! With somesimple modifications such as a higher resolution webcam (ours was 480p) and acurved mirror that allows the webcam to capture the entire screen, Sistinecould become a practical low-cost touchscreen system.

Our Sistine prototype is open source, released under the MIT License.

Recent Posts

Get started

Lift the lid of your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to turn it on, or press Touch ID. Every time you start up, restart, or log out, you need to type your password to log in to your user account. After setting up Touch ID, as long as you're logged in, you can use your fingerprint instead of typing when you're asked for your password.

With Touch ID, you can also use your fingerprint to make purchases from the App Store, Apple Books Store, and iTunes Store, as well as many of your favorite websites using Apple Pay.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

On MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar, the Touch ID button is on the right side of the Touch Bar at the top of the keyboard.


13- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar introduced in late 2019 or later


13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar introduced in 2016 through 2019

MacBook Air

On MacBook Air models introduced in 2018 and later, the Touch ID button is on the right side of the function keys.

MacBook Air (2020)

How to set up Touch ID

  1. Make sure that your finger is clean and dry.
  2. Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences.
  3. Click Touch ID.
  4. Click the plus sign to add a fingerprint, type your user account password when prompted, then follow the onscreen instructions.
  5. Use the checkboxes to select the Touch ID features that you want to use on your Mac.

Tips for adding fingerprints:

  • Place your finger on the Touch ID button — but don't press. Hold it there until you're asked to lift your finger.
  • Lift and rest your finger slowly, making small adjustments to the position of your finger each time.
  • Add up to three fingerprints.

You can also delete fingerprints:

  1. Hover the pointer over a fingerprint. A delete button appears.
  2. Click the delete button, then enter your password to remove the fingerprint.

Use Touch ID to unlock your Mac

After you set up Touch ID, you can use it to unlock your Mac. Wake up your Mac by opening the lid, pressing a key, or tapping the trackpad. Then place your finger lightly on Touch ID to log in.

You must type your password to log in after you start up, restart, or log out of your Mac. When you're logged in, you can quickly authenticate with Touch ID whenever you're asked for your password.

You can also use Touch ID to unlock these features on your Mac:

  • Password-protected Notes
  • The Passwords section in Safari preferences
  • System Preferences
    If you have FileVault turned on, you must type your password to unlock the Security & Privacy pane and the Users & Groups pane.

If multiple users set up Touch ID and log in to the same Mac, they can use Touch ID to switch accounts. Just press Touch ID, and your Mac switches to the logged-in user account associated with the fingerprint.

Make iTunes Store, App Store, and Apple Books Store purchases with Touch ID

Use Touch ID instead of your Apple ID password to make purchases on your Mac:

  1. Open the iTunes Store, App Store, or Apple Books Store.
  2. Click the buy button for something you want to purchase. A Touch ID prompt appears.
  3. Place your finger on Touch ID to complete the purchase.

You might be prompted to enter your password on your first purchase or if you've made changes to the fingerprints that you've enrolled in Touch ID.

Use Touch ID for Apple Pay

You can make easy, secure, and private purchases on websites using Apple Pay on your Mac. Apple Pay never stores your credit or debit card information and never shares it with the merchant.

Apple touch screen macbook pro

Apple Pay is not available in all regions.

Set up Apple Pay

On Mac notebooks with Touch ID, you're prompted to configure Apple Pay during setup. If you don't choose to set up Apple Pay when you first start up, you can set it up later in the Wallet & Apple Pay section of System Preferences. You can also check your transaction history and manage your payment cards there. For example, you can add or delete cards and make updates to contact or shipping information.

You can add payment cards to only one user account on your Mac. If you set up Apple Pay in your main user account and then log in under another account, Touch ID and Apple Pay are unavailable. In this situation, you can use an eligible iPhone or Apple Watch to complete Apple Pay transactions that you begin in Safari on your Mac.

How To Activate Touch Screen On Macbook Air Pro

Make a purchase in Safari with Apple Pay

On websites that offer Apple Pay, click the Apple Pay button during checkout. When prompted, complete the payment by placing your finger lightly on Touch ID.

Turn on, restart, sleep, and shut down

Press Touch ID to turn on your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air if it's open and turned off. If your Mac is closed and turned off, simply open it to turn it on.

Unlike with older Mac notebooks, holding down Touch ID on your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air doesn't display a dialog with options to Sleep, Restart, or Shut Down. You can find these options in the Apple menu. If your Mac is unresponsive, you can hold down Touch ID for six seconds to force a shut down. Note that you'll lose any unsaved work if you do this.

Pressing Touch ID won't put your Mac to sleep. Instead, choose Apple menu  > Sleep. If your Mac has a Touch Bar, you can also add a Sleep button to the Control Strip:

  1. Click Finder.
  2. Select View > Customize Touch Bar.
  3. Touch the Control Strip region of the Touch Bar to switch to Control Strip customization.
  4. Use your pointer to drag items that you want, such as the Sleep button, from the main display down into the Touch Bar. You can also drag items left and right within the Touch Bar to rearrange them, or drag them up and out of the Touch Bar to remove them.
  5. Tap Done in the Touch Bar or click Done on the screen when you finish.

Learn more about Touch ID

You can use Touch ID to control accessibility features on your Mac:

  • Triple-press Touch ID to display the Accessibility Options window.
  • Hold the Command key and triple-press Touch ID to toggle VoiceOver on and off.

How To Activate Touch Screen On Macbook Air 13.3

In some situations, you need to enter your password instead of using Touch ID:

  • If you've just restarted your Mac
  • If you've logged out of your user account
  • If your fingerprint isn't recognized five times in a row
  • If you haven't unlocked your Mac in more than 48 hours
  • If you've just enrolled or deleted fingerprints

Macbook Pro Touch Screen

If you still need help unlocking your Mac with Touch ID, follow these tips. Try again after each one:

Full Screen On Macbook Air

  • Make sure that your fingers are clean and dry.
    Moisture, lotions, sweat, oils, cuts, or dry skin might affect fingerprint recognition. Certain activities can also temporarily affect fingerprint recognition, including exercising, showering, swimming, or cooking.
  • Your finger should cover Touch ID completely. While Touch ID is scanning, don't press down or move your finger.
  • Try setting up a different fingerprint.




broken image