WOW - surface

Look at this

Simply amazing!!

About time too. I watched "Bill Gates" demonstrating this thing about a year ago - in a sort of airport scenario. It's certainly moved on a bit though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftJhDBZqss

This impressed me about a year back and thought it was incredible. The surface thing looks identical!

I'm guessing it's another thing Microsoft have bought!

Somehow it's no so cool anymore when you realise you're on MS.com

From one of the videos: "In the future, our mobile phones will help us plan the evening"

Damn, I hate waiting for the future :P

What will it cost to repair when a chav puts a screwdriver through it, though?

All this thing will do is push more ads into our faces...

Barney

Yet another good reason to go back to growing our own spuds and living in the woods.

Neat, it just sat there saying buffering forever! :(

Looks quite nice but it has a fatal flaw - it would be really uncomfortable with anything other than a tabletop display - and people don't like tabletop displays, because it's uncomfortable to sit hunched over them.

I don't think Apple are much in the market of selling their technology to Microsoft. Probably something else they STOLE.

Neat I just got a black screen.

I'm not impressed. Let me know when they can do it in a thin flexible plastic overlay that I can place on any table or desk. As it is it will just be a novelty item that you see in Vegas or Disneyland. And not even a very original novelty at that.

As for who stole what from whom, lest you forget, they showed exactly this sort of interface on the Minority Report long before the iPhone or this Smart Surface. And where did Minority Report get the ideas? Well Hollywood sure as hell didn't come up with such revolutionary ideas themselves. They got them from university researchers who've been researching how best to do interfaces like this for years. The same folks from whom Apple got the ideas for the GUI and the mouse.

yeah it's pretty interesting. I postulated that restaurant/pub system to some mates about 10 years back. You could place orders like it too and get it brought to your table.

I would hate to keep cleaning the finger smudges.

I dont like this things in restaurants...or pubs..there is no match for woman whos asking me .'..whats up dude..' yeahh...

Pretty gutsy move to do a web site with this. I, for one, look forward to where this technology goes!

I wonder if this is their intent for what the next Windows will plug in to... this is screaming "proprietary 1st party software only!", but Microsoft is really good about this stuff so I think we're in luck and should be very glad it wasn't Apple that got here first, wrapping the idea in patents and keeping the SDKs to themselves. (Not that Microsoft is much better, but they do seem to have a good track record for supporting outside developers).
This may even allow me to forgive Microsoft for the recent pains IE 7 has caused me (no display:table WTAHFAJT!?).
It's not impossible; just takes a very scary reinvention of the wheel that Microsoft presumably has the best resources to achieve.

Of course, 95% of those videos (restaurants? cashiers? airports? cell phone stores?! -- Yay, this $10,000 table does what 6 pieces of cardboard can do in five seconds!) will never happen.
Nonetheless, I have always thought digital stuff lacks tactility, and thus it is just not as fun to download software / music vs. buying a disk with a case and a picture and an unnecessarily huge manual. This is one of very few attempts to directly address that.

nice, but why still manual. using a device it is possible to track peoples sight. why not work that out, so you can control a computer just by looking at it. technology is there, but i guess its to expencive and not portable enough.

...me personally hate that things with controlling computer by eyes or something(I understand that feature for disabled people)..

Control by sight would be horribly touchy, and just like control by mouse. This is attractive because the physical input and the output are both on the same scale, at the same level. That is why it gives the interconnection between the physical and digital world.

Another idea swallowed up by the M$assive blob.
Wonder how much the inventors got paid...

At almost 6 grand-a-pop im happy with my mouse... for now :)

LOL! Good one.

You think that's bad, how about "shitty XML parser won't let you do proper SCRIPT tags"

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="../script/script.js" />

Perfectly valid XHTML. The page will not be rendered. At all.

Do you understand the purpose of a publicly traded company. At all? Besides sinking 5 billion dollars a year into the black hole that is the XBox360's budget, and paying out dividends to shareholders, how much do you think is left for innovation? Do you think it's by accident that in the 30 odd years they've been developing software, they only managed one innovation (which they failed to capitalize on, and would have probably scrapped completely if it wasn't for Google)?

Wow did you see the camera part? They just laid the camera on the screen and pop come the pictures!

Yes we ALL have cameras with wi-fi / blue tooth connectivity... and we've all experienced that everything communicates instantly and doesn't take a few seconds to pair up and then to download all the pictures also happens instantly...

...or it's a fake demo and they're lying.

I did just realize that the instant camera thing is essentially a very expensive barcode reader and use of existing wireless functionality.

Still cool, but that kind of demystified it...
The interface makes it a lot more intuitive, of course (who in their right mind would want a barcode reader for their camera?), but... I now can be patient and wait until something like this miraculously costs the same as a normal desktop PC.

When Bluetooth came out to the market all people spoke of personal interactivity with every gadget (pc, portable, phone, vcr, coffe machine and so on...). After 5 years (or more?) there is nothing like.
Now the market want to push on Wireless USB: yes sure all running to buy the latest technolgy...I doubt: simple interface (wireless / NFID or whatever) should be accepted by final user FIRST. So how many of you want to stay in front of a giant wall-video moving image and click around with his own finger?
In certain situation (work, school, medic) this could be a safe and welcomed revolution, for personal use I have some doubts.
[by the way: AMD Fusion project showed a few weeks ago a program for image regconiction - so having a such interface is no more (well - will be no more) a technical problem/high cost solutions]

Is this based on the work of the Han .... guy who's work also is licenced by Apple for the iPhone?

More. Much more. Try 13.

Original bluetooth just sucked, that does not count ^^
If we go by that, most technical stuff is just spreading to slow. How many years do steamers exist now? And how few actually have one to make their vegetables instead of destroying anything we see as reason to eat them?

The current BT standard is around 5 years old and in the end it was the first incarnation of the BT standard that made sense to be used at all. Before that only low speed stuff was possible, some keyboards etc
but only for pure office use. (normally those still were running on RF and blocking all other devices in the bureau hehe)

surface looks really nice.. I have to say tho unless the price is really low i dont think your going to see it in homes any time soon.

I saw a video a long time ago when Apple showed something similar. Did MS steal that, or what is the big difference between the two?
Ï am unable to watch the youtube video since I'm at work so I don't know if it will answer my question.