Microsoft Surface
Out of Steve Bathiche and Andy Wilson's work on Surface Computing comes an elegant 30-inch diagonal display table that reacts to touch -- and will hit the market in Winter 2007. It'll be on show at Siggraph in August.
Check out the demo (done in Flash (!) ).
Please, can I have one in my living room?
More on the Microsoft Research work into surface computing (and a cool video) from the MSR TechFest event this year.
P.S. Microsoft stuff gets cross-posted here for another week but my blog is actually here.
Comments
Anonymous
May 29, 2007
I wonder if they bought this guy out, or just ripped him off..? http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65Anonymous
May 29, 2007
Pete, check out the timeline on the Surface site. This is research that's been going on in MSR for years and years. And for what it's worth, I've seen similar interactive displays before (even commercial ones - I saw one in a bar in Vegas when I was there for Mix07). But if Surface has a robust enough... surface... and a good UI, some killer apps, and could REALLY be in my living room, then they're on to something big.Anonymous
May 29, 2007
Please , let me know hardware details that this computer(Tablet) usesAnonymous
May 30, 2007
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May 30, 2007
Brian: I was thinking they might have used Silverlight... which, while in Alpha/Beta, is working pretty well. Oh, and if you see Surface and all you can think of is iPhone... well... you're kinda cute :)Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Microsoft Surface has just been announced and has started to ripple through blogs ( Rob has just bloggedAnonymous
May 30, 2007
I have been surfing all the blogs I can find today regarding the Microsoft Surface launch and everyone has a wannabe techno geek lauding the iphone. (yawn) Macs are for girls! and kids and grannies. ooohhh look at the pretty pictures on my mac..... Microsoft just changed the world!!! (again) Remeber today's date 053007 There won't be a mac with multi-touchscreen capabilities for years to come.Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Some months ago, I doodled one idea for potential major application for this kind of technology. It's uploaded on Flickr as a set. (It's really rough sketch and draft, I do apologize for that. ) Basically, if you add one more screen hanging on the wall, large one, then you can use that system in presenting news and science programs and so on. In my demo doodle cartoon, Brain Lamb from C-span is talking about Global Warming with a guest scientist. And if you link that to applications running on desktop, say browser - Web and 'Information programs'(on TV/Cable channels) would become seamless one thing and that'd enable us humans to see - how we are working/steering world riddled with complex and fast moving problems and subjects. Say in the regular news program, coverage can be 10 minutes on big complex issue, which is too short, but people can go to the web then and check further more. etc. They should look into the possibility to develop a system which they can sell to BBC and CNN and so on - and it will turn into major information architecture of tomorrow. If they have hard time getting what I'm saying, contact me. : D (I want to think they already thought of something like my ideas, but just in case.) By the way, Popular Mechanics had coverage on this issue in March 6th it seems. http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4213259.htmlAnonymous
May 30, 2007
> Microsoft just changed the world!!! (again) Surface is borrowing work (heavily) from the Media Lab in the late 90's. (Not unabashedly- one of Surface's creators, Andy Wilson, was there when metaDESK was being worked on.) > There won't be a mac with multi-touchscreen capabilities for years to come. Or 30 days. iPhone was announced to have multi-touch, and will be out in June.Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Andy and I were contemporaries at the Media Lab (although I doubt he would remember me, I was a lowly Masters student at the time, but my advisor, Bruce Blumberg, was a good mate of his. They both also did some amazing work at that time, by the way.) David thanks for the heads-up on the iPhone blogging frenzy... given the long history of multitouch concepts I just don't see what this has to do with iPhone compete at all. Yes, Media Lab is one of several places that have been showing proof-of-concepts like this for many years. And I don't think Microsoft ever said "ZOMG FIRST MULTITOUCH SCREEN TABLE EVAAAAR!!1!!1one" about Surface. In fact I blogged a demo of something like this from somewhere completely different over a year ago! http://blogs.msdn.com/robburke/archive/2006/02/15/532674.aspx But isn't it obvious how much potential there is for a commoditised flavour of this technology that runs WPF etc? Scoble has some more info on how Surface works here which only makes me more excited, although as expected, at release it will be for commercial apps only: http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/30/more-on-microsofts-surface-computing-initiatives/Anonymous
May 30, 2007
Yeah, I knew Microsoft would catch up to the iPhone frenzy! I bet our friend Jeff Han http://multi-touchscreen.com/ who pioneered the Multi touch must not be too happy. :)Anonymous
May 31, 2007
Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Surface . The product is a result of a long researchAnonymous
May 31, 2007
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May 31, 2007
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June 05, 2007
Does anyone know how to get in contact with the dev team or anyone on the surface team? We have a great software app written in WPF that could benefit greatly from the surface table. We actually built our own touch screen table--not multitouch but still works very well and our customers love it. Having microsoft-backed hardware and "Surface Certified" would be great. I would think it would be quick and easy to modify our application for Surface. Perhaps Microsoft could use our software for demo purposes as well. Any help would be great! clott@cpsusa.com and c_lott01@hotmail.com, phone at 916-635-3487. p.s. We are a Microsoft Certified Partner. :)