A little pricey $5000 - $10,000 but I guess Bill Gates is trying to show they still have some innovation left in them. Early reports look good, but not quite sure what market they are going after. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070530/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_coffee_table_of_the_future
They're innovative enough to copy Apple, just they are always doing on the Windows side... only that they're around a couple of years late. Btw, the iPhone's screen is based on almost the same technology...
Watched the video on MSNBC - one cool application is at restaurants. You can go through the menu, see images of what you want to order and when it's time to pay, you lay your credit card down on the table. If you're splitting the check, you can drag which items are being paid for by which person. It also lets you compute the tip. Of course, at $5000 and $10,000 it doesn't sound super cost-effective. But it is pretty cool.
Multi-touch screens have been around since the 80's, but nobody has done much with them. It appears from that Popular Mechanics video, that Microsoft may be licencing some of this technology that Jeff Han from NYU has been researching and creating (they spun this technology off into a separate company called Perceptive Pixel). Not completely sure, but both Jeff Han and Microsoft are shown together, suggesting some sort of partnership. Though I wouldn't put it past both Microsoft and Apple to blatently copy this technology, as they both did with Xerox's prototype GUI back in the late 70's early 80's. (see Pirates of Silicon Valley and History of the GUI). The ablility (as shown in the PopSci video) to place a camera on the surface and then have the photos appear on the desktop, might be Microsoft's innovation. Not sure on that though. All in all, very cool stuff, but will probably still be years before its affordable for home use.
Pirates of Silicon Valley, although a nice (and geeky ) movie, is incorrect in many many aspects and simplify a lot more (just see how they showed what happened with QDOS). Here is the story from the mouth (or actually, hands) of one of the original developers of the Macintosh and it's GUI, who also worked at Xerox before joining the Macintosh project.
Microsoft doesn't innovate anything. They just buy or clone stuff. Microsoft is just a good marketing monopolist. -Tom
Yeah. The Xbox Live service is a rip off of Telephone service (though they forgot to add hidden fees), and Gamer Score they stole from Baseball.
Great, so now you need to keep your coffee table connected to the internet so it can download security updates and bug fixes every day. Did everyone miss the part of the article where it says the machine is running Vista?
It's funny how their monopoly just sprang into existence overnight. Surface stuff looks really cool... Doesn't Gates claim it will be down to the $1,000 level in 3-5 years? Still expensive, but well within the budget of your average household.
Yep. That first venture of Bill Gates and the first half decade of Microsoft's existence took place in a 24 hour period. x 2 Also, Microsoft's fortunes really came when they made the deal with IBM to license them the OS that they didn't have yet. "The Road Ahead" details it just as well as the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" film. Apparently some major players in the gambling industry will be making use of it first. I'm wondering what it will mean when it becomes a bit more affordable for home use, but could video game arcades make a comeback with this kind of device? Will uWink make use it? I'm just hoping it isn't loaded down with so-called DRM. I'd like to see Gnu/Linux running on it, or at least the ability to let custom hardware talk with it through some kind of open standard analogous to the way HTTP lets anything be a web browser to any server. Here's hoping that tools will become a bit more open and available. B-( Imagine watching a show on TV and thinking, "Oh! I forgot to make a pot of coffee", bringing up "My Kitchen Appliances", selecting My Coffee Maker, checking the status of it ("does it need water? Does the filter need changing?"), and starting it. Then you can play a quick game of Pong with your six-year-old child using your hands on the table.
Although I knew the MS haters and naysayers would be in full force in this thread, I'm actually pretty excited about this. Sure there have been similar technologies in the past, and MS isn't really innovating, but who cares? Afaik this is the first time there has actually been a semi-affordable product using technology like this (please correct me if I'm wrong), which is a big deal to me. I'm mostly exciting about the (board)gaming possibilities. Imagine a minatures game with digital terrain, or a boardgame with realtime gameplay elements played out on the screen. Even straight ports of popular German boardgames to this system would be awesome.
Certainly not as impressive, but this was designed specifically for gaming: http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/pictures/entertaible-pict.html (Not available for purchase, unfortunately.)