Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Zythryn

Although I agree with many of your points Craig, I disagree with the 'flavor' of your post.

I didn’t mean to give my post a flavor suggesting I’m not delighted by the idea of tabletop where you can draw and scoot rendered objects around almost as if they physically existed, and affect it with objects that physically do exist. I want it on all my tabletops, floors, walls and ceilings!

I’ve a suspicion that Microsoft’s offering hasn’t quite met what’s required for it to be what I, or the market, want, and that the shortcoming is fundamental to the material and components of which the Surface is made – visible light cameras and projectors. Unless I’m missing a critical detail of its current design, I think it’s missing a critical piece necessary for it to have the input accuracy it needs.

Since my initial speculation that it might be based on a scheme of measuring changes in reflection of the back of the screen due to proximity or touch on the front, like the iPhone and Jeff Han’s experimental devices use, learning that the Surface is, like an EyeToy, actually camera based, and thinking about it a bit, I increasingly suspect that neither approach is quite what’s needed, but that the camera approach is closer. My main reason for suspecting this is that, while currently much better for pointing accuracy and size, none of the current touchscreens can, AFAIK, read coded IDs, as the Surface currently can.

The basic problem with existing camera position detector systems, like the Surface and the EyeToy, if their lack of precision. From my outsider’s perspective, this appears to be due to the difficulty of precisely locating a single reference point on the touching object in question – a finger, stylus, or what have you – with multiple cameras. My guess is that this is a hard problem, for which the solution may be: project a reference point on the object, and have cameras track that.

I’m just a spectator – of the armchair quarterback kind – but, like an armchair quarterback, even though my ideas may not be as good as the people doing the actual work, I likely have an accurate sense of when they are doing well, vs. being misguided. The “multitouch revolution”, of which devices like the iPhone and the Surface are sometimes termed part, is producing a lot of wonderful technology, but is also far from adequate, and frequently, if not misguided, not going where I’d like as fast as I’d like.

I find the use of this technology amazing and am surprised no one else has done it before on this type of application.

Me too, especially as the underlying technology has been around for a while, and been implemented on a small scale many times and places. Touchscreen-based help kiosks came and went in my areas’s grocery stores in the late 1980s – though I loved them, store staff tells me few other people did, and they were deemed not worth the maintenance they required. In the same period, terminals placed under transparent desktops – sometimes horizontally, sometimes angled for viewing from other than overhead – were on the cutting edge of “ergonomic design”. They’re now footnotes in technology history, and plant stands. PDAs were the next big thing, then were not, and tablet PCs, an official Microsoft next big thing, have failed in the 7 years since their launch to gain over 1% of the PC market.

This history suggests that it’s very hard to predict what technology will gain real popularity. Early vendors were concerned that the mouse would be unacceptable to a wide market, while I predicted in the early 1990s that by the mid 1990s, monitor touchscreens would obsolesce them into technology history. They’re still here, tablet PCs and other touchscreens are hardly found. I think that a much-improved version of something like the Surface will replace i/o devices as we now know them, but my record as a technology prophet is unimpressive.

Now this is a bit of a stretch, as I don't know much about the OS of the 'surface', …

My prediction: Windows Vista

… however I am hoping that a home version will come out in 2008, with a fully functional OS which can play games, run spreadsheets, and do all the media stuff we have seen in the demos.

If you’re willing to dig, and pay, it can be done now. Windows and many unix graphics packages are able to use very large displays, which can be mounted at practically any angle, including “coffee table”. There are several 3rd party companies (though its been a few years since I worked with one) who will turn a monitor of any size into a touchscreen, complete with a external box that allows it to be connected to the box like an ordinary mouse. When last I checked, their support of actions as basic as left doubleclicking was wanting, and of righclicking and scrollwheeling, almost nonexistent.

Originally Posted by orbsycli

How much does it cost??

According to multiple articles (ie: Microsoft confirms Surface, their new $10,000 touch-sensitive table | Gadgetell) the Surface will cost US $10,000, and according to Microsoft, be available “winter 2007”. One will be available for us, “the public”, to paw 6/9/2007 at the Sheraton at 811 7th Ave, NY, NY. Nothing on my calendar suggest I’ll be there then, but if anybody can, I (and lots of other hypographers, I’m sure) would love to hear about it.