The Polytechnic Student Research Programme (PSRP) was initiated by Mr Peter Chen, former Senior Minister of State for Education, and launched by NTU in July 1997. It was then known as the NTU-Polytechnic Research Programme. The objective of PSRP is to expose polytechnic students to R&D work and hopefully to attract them to take up R&D as a career.

In the last few months there were a total of 22 research projects from Temasek Polytechnic that were under this PSRP programme. Among them is Lightdraw which was selected as one of two top research projects from TP.

Loke Lup Peng and Situ Jianle from the Diploma in Information Technology had worked on the Lightdraw project during their internship at the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing (iHPC). Lightdraw aims to be a revolutionary Human-Computer-Interface. Using light sources such as handphone screens, torchlights or laser pointers, multiple users will be able to interact with objects on the computer screen simultaneously from afar. This is advantageous on large screen displays when traversing across the large displays is inconvenient with the traditional mouse. Furthermore, it is useful when parts of the screen are physically out of reach, thus making touch based input unfeasible. Lightdraw also has gesture recognition capability, allowing the user to initiate events with subtle gestures. The students presented the Lightdraw project at the PSRP Best Project Award Presentation Ceremony 2008at Singapore Polytechnicon 11 March 2008.