Your Coffee Table as a Computer
Microsoft has announced a touch-screen table that interacts with gadgets placed on its surface.
Kate Greene 05/30/2007
- 9 Comments
Today Microsoft unveiled a new addition to computing: a coffee table that doubles as a computer for viewing photos, videos, maps, or Web pages, for instance. The electronic furniture, called Microsoft Surface, lets users manipulating these objects directly with their fingers--to resize a picture or rotate it so that someone across the table can look at it.
The table's surface is a multitouch screen, which means that it can accommodate the input from a number of different points of contact at once, not unlike Apple's forthcoming iPhone.
Surface is also similar to technology created by a startup called Perceptive Pixel, founded by Jeff Han, a researcher at New York University. (See "Touch Screens for Many Fingers.")
Microsoft's technology distinguishes itself from that of other touch screens by wirelessly interacting with gadgets on the tabletop. The table is optimized to accommodate up to 52 points of contact, which could mean, for example, all the fingers on 4 people's hands and 12 devices sitting on the surface. A user can set her camera on the tabletop, and cameras inside the table's thick base will detect its presence (as well as the presence of other objects and fingers). Then software that leverages Bluetooth short-range wireless signals uploads the pictures from the user's camera to the tabletop screen. The user can flip, crop, resize, and organize the pictures using her fingers. To transfer a picture to another device on the table, such as a cell phone, she simply flicks the photos toward the gadget. This Popular Mechanics video offers a nice demonstration of the table in action.
The tables are expected to appear in hotels, casinos, and retail stores by the end of this year.
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Guest (learfan)
Surface Touchscreen Furniture
Imagine a restaurant with the menu and lunch special showing to each person sitting at the table. Select your preferences by touch and sit back as the order goes straight to the kitchen.
While you're waiting, catch the latest stock and sports scores. Then, when it's all over but the belching, you can pay by setting your cellphone on the right square.
Now, what to do with all the surly waiters left over?
Reply
Guest (don.hutchinson)
Re: Surface Touchscreen Furniture
Sounds like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Who needs a sophisticated table to answer trivial questions.
Reply
Guest (mnikkel55)
Re: Surface Touchscreen Furniture
No offense intended, but that's kind of shortsighted thinking. One could very well have made a similar statement about the mouse when it was introduced. The above poster's example may not have been the best, but the point is that you don't really know what kinds of uses a device like this may have until people have time to use it and test ideas for what works with it and what doesn't.
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gabrielg01
450 Comments
Re: Surface Touchscreen Furniture
People may become so preoccupied with playing with their own widgets that there will be no social interaction going on at the table.
You know, how some people use cell phones ignoring their partners at the table. This MS Table may make that worse.
On the other hand people could interact more, by playing games and stuff.
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