Microsoft Surface

[Hae-Yu]

A lot of news on this one today. When I first read the article on PC World (http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132346-page,1/article.html), I wasn't impressed. My first thought at seeing a touch-sensitive table was, "woohoo, we have a million of these things in Las Vegas." Its biggest trick was multitouch, meaning you can do several things on it at once instead of just pushing a virtual button. When I read that, I thought, "whoopty-doo, Steve Jobs already demonstrated multitouch on the iPhone 2 months ago." In fact, the PC World pictures demonstrating a person shuffling pictures was pretty similar.

Then I read this Popular Mechanics article (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html) and things lit up considerably.
Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it — just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone.
This is a working model, not just a demonstrator and Microsoft states that Harrah's hotel chain will have them on casino floors by the end of the year. The article runs through a considerable number of scenarios which make great sense and illustrate the possibilities. Considering that other corporations have partnered with Microsoft, this technology looks to hold more promise than just a niche market.

[sylverarrow]

That thing is cool as hell. I would like to play with one. You beat me to the post but I put the same thing in the General forums.. heh

[Triple_6]

Minority Report sure nailed it. Me and a friend were just talking about this a few weeks ago how it would be cool to have a computer like in that movie. Now we're one step closer!

[JimbobSS]

That is pretty tight. I want one. wait, did he say 5 - 10 thousand dollars? ouch, maybe I'll wait till the price comes down.

[Hae-Yu]

For this, I could easily see people playing a game like StarCraft. Draw and stretch a lasso around a bunch of units and then tap an enemy unit, or tap out waypoints on the screen. Or they could use both index fingers to rapidly select individual units out of a group, such as sorting out the medics and ghosts from a group of marines. They could have buttons for shift, ctrl, and other click modifiers.

I hope they don't start going toward a touch screen keyboard. Those are not very useful at all.

The problem is, they need to find a way to make the screen fingerprint resistant. I've maintained touch screens for years now and so far, I haven't seen anything that can resist fried chicken or potato chips.

[Hae-Yu]

Another article (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070530-what-lurks-below-microsofts-surface-a-qa-with-microsoft.html), this one from Ars.

Three short but good demo videos
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

The surface itself is not touch sensitive; it uses a system of cameras beneath the surface to triangulate positioning. The article mentions it can accept 52 simultaneous inputs.