Microsoft “Surface”
The big buzz is Microsoft’s announcement of “Surface” (aka Milan), a 30″ LCD/computer/furniture that you can interact with directly without the need of a keyboard or mouse. As discussed in my previous post, while there are lots of digitizing and touch screen technologies around, with the exception of the Lemur, they’re all one pen/finger at a time. Surface on the other hand allows multiple fingers at the same time, permitting a huge range of possible interaction gestures. Plus, all those fingers don’t need to belong to the same person!
It seems Surface accomplishes this multi-touch interactivity via an embedded camera. Not only can it track many fingers but it can read a credit card number and scan other every day objects. It features a custom OS “based on Vista”. While it makes sense that you’d want a specialty OS since the interactivity is so different, its yet to be seen how open this will be as a platform for third party applications. There’s some cool possibilities in there by combining the detecting of the position and ID of transparent tiles then projecting images onto them.
I was quite excited when I first heard about it and couldn’t wait until the “winter 2007″ release to get my hands on one, until I read that in its current form it costs $15,000-$20,000. It’ll be years before its price gets to the consumer level.
For further reading, Tom’s Hardware has a good writeup on it, including an interesting analysis of it vs. the media center platform (now defunct). The consistent comment from the bloggers is that this isn’t a new idea. True, but what’s exciting is that its real and you’re going to be able to buy one (eventually). That’s typical Microsoft, grab an existing good idea and actually ship it. Well good for them, I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Their “Origins” page however gives the impression that they dreamt this up themselves.
Many years back I was on loan from OTI at the University of Toronto working on their Telepresence project. I remember at the time that Bill Buxton and the gang had this cool work surface with a camera underneath it that could track multiple objects interacting on it (fingers, bricks, etc). Hmm, sounds familiar? Check out the following references:
- Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved, an excellent comprehensive history writeup by Bill Buxton
- Bricks: Laying the Foundations for Graspable User Interfaces
- A GUI paradigm using tablets, two-hands and transparency
Earlier today I connected the dots: Bill Buxton is now at Microsoft Research. The Surface site shows different people involved in the project but I don’t see his name anywhere. Hard to believe he wasn’t involved in this.
More recently there was the rather infamous Jeff Han TED talk (re: infamous - try typing in “ted talks” into google search bar and “ted talks jeff han” is one of the first suggestions). Again people thought this was revolutionary but its more evolutionary. Mind you, the Jeff Han talk is slick and the device is clearly more refined than the old UofT work, thanks certainly in part to the added computational power now available for image analysis.
Lets forget about the “credit where due” part, the big news is that some big company actually went out and built one of these, technology plus OS, and we’re going to start seeing their use in every day applications. This, in combination with the iPhone, encourages me to believe that there is momentum building in the industry behind touch and multitouch input. Keep ‘em coming!