http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Looks like an interesting device aimed at restaurants, and other retail spaces. Glad to see this type of technology finding it's way into the market from multiple companies now instead of just being a dog and pony show at tech expos.

It would make an amazing interface for working with photographs as has already been demonstrated at the dog and pony shows. A lot of software will have to be written to properly make use of it though. I'm looking directly in Adobe's direction now for having interfaces in all their applications that are at least 10-20 years out of date, let alone cool enough to ever take advantage of something like this.

I saw the piece on Today where BIll Gates was showing this thing off. It looked pretty damn sweet. Especially the seamless recognition of phones and credit carts.

Along the same lines, this thing impressed the hell out of me.

Has anyone seen this? My friend saw Bjork at Coachella and apparantly her crew was using one of these.

I wonder if they're licensing the multitouch technology from Apple.

The ReacTable project is pretty damn cool. Wow. I'd really like to see it doing something other than synthesized techno. I could imagine this is going to evolve very quickly as other musicians bump into its limitations and say "wouldn't it be cool if I could ..."

As to Microsoft's Surface, it certainly looks pretty, but I'm not convinced that it's going to be as huge as they wish it was. Yeah, it looks fun to drag tunes from my collection onto my iPod, but they don't have the kind of power that you get with a textual interface, making queries and designing smart playlists. Likewise, for pictures, you want full-text search of your metadata, and you want any other possible organization to help you nagivate the thousands of pictures that we all have these days. The last thing I want is to sort through an unordered stack of (digital) picture windows.

Let's say a restaurant has one of these things for ordering and paying. How much of a price premium are you willing to spend versus traditional ordering? How do you order something that they didn't anticipate (e.g., a few nights ago, I wanted a buffalo chicken sandwich, but substituted blue cheese dressing for the default ranch dressing)?

The patent issues on this sort of interface are going to be very interesting. Apple claims to have a bunch of IP. It will be interesting to see whether they try to enforce it and how that all shakes out.

The problem I see with the ReacTable is the requirement of having physical doodads. What happens when you run out of LFO widgets? Run to the store and buy more?

The payment thingy demonstrated on the Microsoft web site is kinda neat, though. Drag the items you bought to your card, and the items your friend bought to his card. Of course, waitstaff do that for you now. It's neat, though.

There's an undeniable neat factor. We'll have to wait and see what comes out of it.

I was listening to a short discussion about it on NPR, and someone pointed out "what if a woman puts her purse on the table and it's got her cell phone and camera in it?" It was not sufficiently answered.

Something else that was pointed out is that much of the things that seem precursor to this, from touchscreen interfaces on ATMs to tablet PCs, are really just mouse replacement technologies, and what makes this so special is the fact that multiple styluses can be working at once, and that's true. I've often wished you could attach multiple mice and keyboards to a PC and have multiple people work on one computer at the same time. This answers that question. However, 90% of the demonstrations on the Microsoft web site didn't show off that interface at all. And most of that 10% were just multiple people working at the same time. Only very few showed one person manipulating one thing in multiple ways simultaneously, and that was largely just resizing and turning. Not that I can think of anything better to do with it, but still, they've supposedly been working on it for five years.

...and my guess is the credit card stuff relies on the NFC comms to talk to the cards so you need the "paypass" or similar branded cards.

In the T-mobile demo, I was wondering - what if you put two phones down which look the same on the underside but are actually different models (there are plenty). I don't think it could differentiate that.

There's also the hidden setup here, like entering your WPA key on the camera

Hugo

"The Magic
The Power
The Possibilities

The Space Requirement
The Sore Necks
The Blue Table of Death"

They'll just make a touch keyboard for all the text needs.

Ah, once again, technology has reinvented something they antiquated: using your hands. Actually touching objects in your work space was nicely replaced by the mouse, but now the mouse is replaced by touching things. Just like the keyboard replaced the pen, but the Tablet PC replaced the keyboard. Can I reinvent smoke signals to replace e-mail?

Wait, why did nobody tell me Bjork was playing North America during May! She was in NYC three times and I never heard a peep of it. Hopefully I can catch her in Scotland September 2nd.... if I can tear myself away from the meet.

Some day, I will have a ReacTable, and I'll master it. Amazing stuff.

I went to see the ReacTable in NYC last weekend. It was very cool to see it's glowing luminescence, hear it through crisp loudspeakers, and watch two artists effortlessly shape the sound.

If ReacTable is coming to your town, I highly suggest you check it out. It's an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of some amazing technology. Probably akin to seeing the first MP3 DJ turntable. Sure, keyboard/computer synthazisers can produce sound just like turntables can play vinyl, but these new technologies do it so much cooler.

Quote:
What happens when you run out of LFO widgets? Run to the store and buy more?

You'll run out of space on the table before you run out of widgets. The artists had stacks of them lining the edge of the table. And some widgets (the large cubes) have a different sound effect on each of the 6 sides. The artists were even swapping in new panels to some widgets. Of course, each side and each panel has a unique pattern so the camera below the table can recognize it and its orientation. Amazing stuff.

Please do, I'd love to hear it. I'm dying to break out of the "Trance Top 40" rut I unwittingly placed myself into.