Engineers at Eyebeam, an engineering and design firm based in New York, have created a scaled-down open-source version of Microsoft Surface, called Cubit.

By sharing the Cubit’s hardware schematics and software source code, the engineers are significantly reducing the cost of owning a multitouch table: $500 to $1,000. They’re also fostering innovation by giving engineers an open platform on which to develop novel multitouch applications.

Cubit has a single camera inside the table that can be a simple webcam with an added infrared filter, and a small image projector can be purchased for about $300. Software is available on the Cubit project’s site.