Microsoft's "Surface"

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Chris Z

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This product is simply amazing! I mean look at all the things they say they can do with this (in the videos [link below])! This is just truly awesome!
Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table-shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.
The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to debut in November in U.S. commercial locations, such as T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.
Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
Cool retail tool

With a price tag between $5,000 US and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn't immediately aiming for the finger-painting set. The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years, but in the meantime, some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cellphones at T-Mobile stores. When customers select a phone on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.
Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or a rewards card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items "onto" the card.
At Harrah's locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah's venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner reservations.
Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.
Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface's surface; digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen. Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images — behaviour made possible by the advanced graphics support in Windows Vista.
"It's not a touch screen, it's a grab screen," Bolger said.
New strategy for Microsoft?

Historically, Microsoft has tended to focus on creating new software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.
Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology's inner workings under wraps will limit what early customers — the businesses Microsoft is targeting first with the machine — will be able to do with it.
But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by demonstrations of Surface. The system is "important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how to innovate, and innovate in a big way," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Source: CBC News
View the videos: Here
 

swirly

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Yea, it's insane. I just found it on digg, and am watching it now. I like how the today show calls it "Microsoft’s new virtual reality". Cause its not. It’s just a giant touch screen. I believe that this is there step towards a standing unit I saw in a video that resembles something from.... the Bourne identity I believe? But it stands has 3 cameras behind it and tracks movement. It can respond to your hand moving closer or farther away, thus serving as a "click"...But who knows who may buy it for 10 g's. Who really needs something like this? I mean what purpose does it serve, other than to act as a giant touch screen...well, I take that back. It would be good for designers. They can all input quickly and have a big view of the design and such. So I don’t know.

edit* I guess this is also a step to the "paperless" desktop. I mean it would be pretty nifty for my mom whos a teacher and for all my teachers to be able to have all their papers scattered on the screen like those photos instead of piled high.
 
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Cubeform

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Watched it too. Amazing, although it's pretty old. I'd buy this over an iPhone any day, although right now the Surface seems to be aimed at commercial businesses like fancy, high-class restaurants, Harrah's casinos, etc. If I could get my hands on it, I'd still buy it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I'd like to point out that I was talking about the multi-touch feature of the iPhone, and how I would prefer a Microsoft surface. The iPhone isn't really that special without multi-touch.
 
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daman371

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It looks very cool but I bet it will be very pricey. It is probably a way to compete with Apple Macbooks.
 

Chris Z

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I believe that it'll cost about $10,000 when it first comes out, and they have or are releasing it soon to a few partner companies (the only one i can think of is Sheraton hotels).
 

lambada

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I swear I saw something very similar to this agesss ago.
Can't think for the life of me where though.

By similar I mean the touch screen, resize things drag things around style thing.
 

lambada

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That's the one Cubeform.
This kind of technology is really the way to go.
Maybe there'll be a Linux version soon!! :p
 

KowKing

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Maybe there'll be a Linux version soon!! :p

Hopefully there won't be. Microsoft is the only corporation so far to demo a well working unit. They'll be the first to market it, and the first to produce and sell the units. If Linux enters the competition, the Surface will still be rather expensive. You need another group of people with an actual business plan, unlike the Linux crowd who thinks everything should be free in a market where everything is lowered in price by competitive pricing.

Yeah, I hate Linux fanboys.
 
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