Where to start with LCD Touchpanel Project?

I want to make a personal project to design and build a replacement instrument cluster for my motorcycle.

I want it to be a LCD screen with touch panel. 16-bit colors, with a programmable microprocessor driving it.

I am fluent in pic, but the pic24h only supports up to a 480*272pixels, and I want to have a screen about 6" diagonally.

Any suggestions as to where to start? Any websites that you want to refer me to that have something similar already created and documented?

All help is appreciated.

There are primarily two different types of touchscreen that dominate. Old established were resistive touchscreen. New thing is capacitive (or E-field) touch screen. (used on latest mobile phones, like iPhone). These have fancy controller for gestering interpretation, like finger swipes, tap, etc.

If you only need relative coarse (half a finger width) capability I have seen a touchscreen made with a row and column setup of IR LED emitters and IR detectors setup along the topside edges of LCD.

6" diagonal with 16bit colour is a huge LCD for a microcontroller to handle. You'll need an ARM7 at least and you need a load of memory for that screen resolution.

You might want to try the LPC2478, which has built in TFT hardware support. You can see this for touchscreen management:
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/tsc2046-controller-and-nds-touchscreen.92141/

A colour LCD gets pretty washed out on a bright day. Not the best idea for a cluster.