RSSWhere is Microsoft Going Today with Its Touch-Table 'Surface?'
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 30, 2007, 12:38 PM
This morning's announcement by Microsoft of a new specification for table-top touch-sensitive computers - highlighted by a demonstration package produced for NBC's "Today" program - came as no surprise to BetaNews readers who read about an early demonstration of what's now being called "Microsoft Surface" technology, at the company's WinHEC conference in Los Angeles two weeks ago. But judging by its reception, the early demo may have gone off less splendidly than the NBC package.
The concept has been in Microsoft's labs for quite some time, and it's certainly not the only company that has ever worked on this idea: multi-point touch-sensitive horizontal displays that enable information to appear on a table, and that let users "grab" it as though it were objects movable beneath a transparent surface.
But this morning's announcement adds one bit of information: The company is now working with partners to premiere working prototypes of Surface computers in retail stores, hotel lobbies, and potentially casinos - although the extent of its participation in the latter category may be subject to regulatory approval first.
A marketing document released this morning explains that a Surface device "turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it's a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more."
And in a prepared Q&A released this morning, the company's newly appointed chief of the Productivity and Extended Consumer Experiences Group, Tom Gibbons, borrowed a term made famous by Arlo Guthrie in explaining, in now-familiar Microsoft-ese, what "it's about."
"Surface computing is a powerful movement," Gibbons projected. "In fact, it's as significant as the move from DOS to GUI. Our research shows that many people are intimidated and isolated by today's technology. Many features available in mobile phones, PCs and other electronic devices like digital cameras aren't even used because the technology is intimidating. Surface computing breaks down those traditional barriers to technology so that people can interact with all kinds of digital content in a more intuitive, engaging, and efficient manner. It's about technology adapting to the user, rather than the user adapting to the technology. Bringing this kind of natural user interface innovation to the computing space is what Microsoft is all about."
Microsoft has often "pre-previewed" certain technologies to certain interested parties or to the press, as a way of ascertaining what public interest in a product may eventually be. Sometimes these demonstrations are helpful in unanticipated ways, perhaps to inform the company which ways not to go with a product.
During a keynote speech at WinHEC two weeks ago, the company's chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, gave the first general public demonstration of what is now considered a Microsoft Surface computer, using a form factor the hardware engineers in the crowd weren't expecting: a bookshelf table that, on the "surface," looked like it had just been purchased from Service Merchandise and assembled an hour before the show. [EP's note: This photo was slightly retouched to remove the back of someone's head from the bottom of the shot.]
"What we have here is a traditional table," Mundie's demonstration began, with the uncertain tone of an amateur magician trying out for a talent show. "Nothing magic about the table, but here we have a projection capability with cameras attached to it. This is built with the same technology today that is being made in huge volumes to do Web cameras, for example, or video cameras on the inside, and a TV display on the outside. [Rather than] putting them into a PC for processing, we're able to build an intelligent input/output system."
As his demonstration continued, some audible snickering could be heard from the crowd.
"Here, this game of checkers is one that perhaps an elderly person would play, who's confined to their homes, and she'd play checkers with a friend of hers. So here's a game in progress, and I can take the checker and move it, and I've got physical pieces. The computer is essentially reflecting the moves of the person on the other end by representing them in video."
As Mundie made the final move, however, it turned out that "Nelly's" opponent all this time was a computer-generated elderly friend. With a voice reminiscent of what one might expect from Ray Bradbury's "Usher II," the electronic "RuthAnne" murmured, "You won again! But I'll win tomorrow! Thanks for the game."
"They can talk to each other, there's essentially a video conferencing system in it, to [run the] game at the same time," Mundie continued. "But the table can be used for many purposes."
It is here that the demonstration turned from eerie to blatantly bizarre.
"So here at the end of this game, it's time for Nelly to take some of her medication," Mundie went on. "One of the big issues is getting elderly people to take them at the right time, and to take the right ones. Here, we can actually use optical recognition, and they actually put the pills down."
As he demonstrated, the table would provide a sort of template on top of which "Nelly" is expected to place her pills, before she can continue doing whatever it was she had planned to do next with the talking table. If she put the wrong pill on the surface, the table will warn her. (Behind me, someone commented that the "Aldomet" pills looked like the "OK" buttons in Mac OS X.)
If the checker-player-turned-patient feels she's having an "interaction" with her medication - which could indeed give "interaction" a whole new meaning in this context - Mundie said the table would give Nelly an opportunity to participate in a survey, probably letting her touch on-screen...or on-table buttons corresponding to where she feels her aches and pains.
"So here are two things that are natural extensions to the kind of technology we have in the personal computer environment," said Mundie, "and yet it gives us the ability to do things that would otherwise be quite challenging for people to deal with."
It had seemed that Bill Gates' CES 2007 demonstration of LCD wallpaper that could be instantly switched to suit the tastes of visiting grandmothers, would have been the single least well received demonstration in his company's history. But with all due respect to Craig Mundie - who may have felt as uneasy demonstrating this material as many of us did watching it - the checker-playing, pill-pushing stationery table is easily the least well-received demonstration ever given by Microsoft, dating back to the days when Gates' own "Microchess" challenged "Sargon" on the Apple II.
Throughout the entire show, it was the buzz outside the sessions and throughout the lunch rooms, and the part attendees called their wives and girlfriends about on their cell phones in the corners of hallways. It wasn't the touch-screen technology that people were talking about, though: it was the bewildering notion that Microsoft would want to "make our lives easier" by both entertaining and medicating our parents and grandparents.
For that reason, it is extremely noteworthy that the list of Microsoft's announced partners for its Surface technology includes Harrah's, Starwood Hotels (the parent company of Sheraton), and T-Mobile...and does not include the manufacturers of Toprol, Aldomet, or any other anti-depressant.
I suspect that all of you, well most of you, :P are sitting down and looking in front of you at the monitor, may it be a standard monitor or the one on your laptop, right? My point is we are used to looking in front of us at eye level, NOT down, like when you would be playing card with a real deck of card, (remember those :P ) or a chess board. I wonder if people could really get used to a table that is actually THE monitor. By the way, would that mean monitors as we know them now would basically become obsolete? How much does that impact the actual price of that system? What if that "table monitor" became defective? At the moment we simply use a spare monitor until we either buy a new one or get it repaired. Ok, lots of questions but I'm curious by nature.:P
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|I wonder if people could really get used to a table that is actually THE monitor.
Not for any length of time. The ergonomics alone should be sending Safety Coordinators and Loss Prevention folk around the world into apoplectic fits about now. Looking down for that long (8-hrs a day) would permanently hunch your spine and cause countless problems as you get older.
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|cool joint
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|Hopefully I will still be able to play Minesweeper and Solitaire on it.
...'cause that's what I want to be able to do with it. Forget everything else. You know how awesome it would be to flip the cards all around and zoom in on them real big? That would just be freaking whizbang stuff there.
Plus, I could spill my drinks on it, like I do all the time when I'm drunk, and just like finger paint in my spilled drink while still playing Solitaire.
Zang.....this s*** will be bangin'.
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|Nice, but the BSOD clashes with my sofa.
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|Well, obviously, you should upgrade your sofa.
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|Hmm, Microsoft Sofa. Presumably it's the perfect thing to CRASH on :-)
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|Good one. (LOL)
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|Wow! That's one big tablet PC.
(And that's just about as far in the market we might expect it to go, too. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out why in the world I thought the tablet PC was a good idea--and bought one. "Doh!")
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|http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276384,00.html
This story on Fox News better explains Microsofts current plans for the device. It actually has some very practical uses. I am looking forward to things like this becoming part of everyday life.
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|will it blend?
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|Can it run Linux?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
Something about Natalie Portman...
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|Intel made this a while back (the same technology in the iPhone), and CNN has been using similar devices for years.
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|It looks useful for the applications they have planned so far, especially as shown in the Popular Mechanics video referenced in a comment below. I don't see a real need for it in the home in it's present form. It will be interesting to see where the technology goes and how well it is implemented.
Personally, I would rather have really excellent voice recognition that would allow me to surf to a web site or answer my email without lifting a finger and without a headset.
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|This looks truly amazing. I can't wait to see the types of devices we are going to have 5 years from now!
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|I saw this on this movie called, The Island. the doctor was doing pretty much the same thing, and guess what, you could see microsoft ads everywhere like the xbox and msn search..this is pretty cool actually.
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|Looks to me like nothing more than a glorified touch-screen Kiosk, or worse, a non-portable tablet-PC.
What am I missing here?
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|It's what you *would* be missing: your wallet.
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|http://www.popularmechan...y/industry/4217348.html
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|Answers nothing. It still comes across as a glorified kiosk.
The demo doesn't make a case for any kind of realistic use. We can already do this via bluetooth without having to shell out for a new interface. It's got plenty of "Wow" factor, but falls short on the "why" factor.
I can see this as the launchpad for other uses, but not as a replacement for the PC/Console/etc...
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|several dozen patents?
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|Maybe this will help
http://on10.net/Blogs/la...oft-surfacing-computing/
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|anti-microsoft maybe?
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|I don't think this is meant to replace a PC; certainly not in it's current configuration. Instead of "glorified," I would call it an improved and expanded kiosk. As for "the why factor," I'm sure some imaginative business people will come up with some great ways to utilize this technology.
The improvement over the current kiosk system at Harrahs (shown in one of the links above) is huge. I've used the current Harrah's Rewards kiosk system and it is slow and error prone. The demo of that application alone was very impressive.
I want the screen cleaner contract! ;o)
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|Answers alot. I can imagine having a coffee table that is like command central. Games for the family to play, control your media, pay bills, have conferences sharing documents...
I think you just want a reason to hate on MS.
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|"anti-microsoft maybe?"
No, say it ain't so...if this was demo'd by any other company on the planet the critics would be drooling all over themselves. The potential is enormous (if people would widen that narrow mind just a bit and think about it)
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|Well, that might have something to do with the way that Microsoft has handled technologies in the past, like say security software, voice recognition, etc. You don't have to be "anti-Microsoft" to realize that they often screw things up and slow down progress while they try to catch up with everyone else.
Only the most blindly devoted fanboy would just assume that Microsoft will advance this tech without turning it into a bug-ridden, security risk prone mess. The rest of us will wait and see.
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|ROFLMAO!!!
Yeah, that's me. Mr. Anti-MS.
Games? Yeah, checkers. Good luck with that.
Control you Media? Great, until you want to change a file name, add tags, ya know....anything that might require a keyboard?
And documents?? Well, for viewing only.
Like I said, the possibility of *other* uses aside from the tabletop exists, but the demo unit is pretty much useless to the average user.
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|ROFLMAO!! (Again)
You folks short-term memories are shot to hell. I blame TV.
Go read a book.
Anyone the least bit familiar with *any* of my posts in the past would know that is not the case.
But this? Sorry, even MS can't make this work.
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|No, he would have a valid point. Who would actually use this device as a full pc replacement? I like the videos on the MS site about the product and can see it's use as a kiosk type to order food, play/manage music, share pics and whatnot, but not to replace the PC.
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|Keyboard? It could just pop up and the keyboard is part of the screen.
Ever see Minority Report? If you check out http://www.microsoft.com/surface that's exactly what it made me think of.
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|Who says its to replace a PC?
Currently, I don't have a PC in my coffee table. So what would it be replacing?
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|#1) Not a PC Replacement, a new form of convergence. It also offers tons of new ways to program utilize the PC.
#2) This is NOT A FREAKING tablet PC. It does not use a traditional touch display, instead it uses cameras to recognize your fingers or other objects placed on it. Image 5 people sorting pictures from a stack at the same time, because the cameras are NOT limited to one touch point, or even limited to two, it is virtually has no input point limits.
#3) Sure this could be used as a kiosk, it could also be used by engineers or even someone playing a MMO if the correct interface elements are written for the game. It also could be used for grandma to look through photos and show them to her friends. (Each friend could pull a picture to them and zoom in on it.)
#4) This is more about a 'new' technology of input and the programming apis behind it that allow a computer to see the screen from the other side. For example, playing a card game and want to see your hand, cup your hands on the screen and your cards will display to you since the computer can sense you have your hands placed in a way it can then reveal them to you without others sitting at the computer being able to see them.
#5) Ok, bluetooth sucks, but that is not the point. This device will be able to 'as the technology develops' to recognize devices and communicate even via bluetooth by recognizing how they look when placed on the screen. (Think of it as evolution of drivers that include device image recognition.)
Also everyone here, please stop trying to say this is 'like' the iPhone or other technologies from IBM, etc. NONE of them use image recognition as an input metaphor in correlation to a screen for input.
Now this entire way of interacting with technology could be a flop, but from my personal view, it has a lot of novel and interesting conceptual applications and will not HURT anyone or any market by throwing these ideas into the mix.
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|it has a lot of novel and interesting conceptual applications and will not HURT anyone or any market by throwing these ideas into the mix.
Never said it didn't. In fact, I made a point of ending most of my posts in this thread with a statement to that affect.
It *may* be used in bars for card-game type stations, it *may* be used as a glorified Kiosk.
I highly doubt it will *ever* be used by gamers, grandmas, or engineers in it's current form except possibly as a peripheral for the engineers. Sure, you could plug a keyboard into it, but then how is it that incredibly different than a tablet? And these things look virtually immobile. Shrink it? Sure...but that limits it's usability for the examples you made above.
It's possible, even likely I'm simply not thinking far enough "outside the box", but other interface technologies have come down the pike in the past to the same reception I expect this one to receive. A few Oohs and Aahs, and then we all forget about it.
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|No tactile response. Keyboards without 'em tend not to do so well. People don't like typing without some form of tactile feedback.
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|Saying that "people don't like typing without some form of tactile feedback" is a stretch. Particularly since you don't personally know more than a very minute fraction of all people.
We've been using on-screen keyboards on mobile devices for how long now? And there is no tactile feedback there. A little audible click is plenty of feedback. Of course your keystrokes per minute would be limited by the lack of feeling your finger placement on the "keys."
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|Saying that "people don't like typing without some form of tactile feedback" is a stretch. Particularly since you don't personally know more than a very minute fraction of all people.
Look at the keyboard industry. There *are* some keyboards and devices that emulate keyboards. They don't sell. Even at low prices. Now, you tell me, what do people prefer?
We've been using on-screen keyboards on mobile devices for how long now?
Necessity, not desire. It's not like they're going to plug a full-sized keyboard into these things.
Great use of logic there...Want to try again?
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|Anyone who did a little bit of research (or actually read the article) would know it's not meant to be a PC replacement.
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