
The Story of Microsoft's Surface Hub - technologizer
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046819/the-untold-story-of-microsofts-surface-hub
======
GuiA
Looks like they're trying to bring back the ghost of the original Surface (not
the tablet one). I developed for the original Surface and SUR-40 while in grad
school - in fact, my master's thesis was about certain forms of interactions
enabled on tabletop computers.

The first surface was a cool product, which I still believe was just too early
(poor technology: needed a high DPI screen, sluggish processor, etc; terrible
software, high price tag, smartphones and tablets were not what they are now
so the idea of hub was limited). The SUR-40 was a disaster (the screen would
_bend_ when you touched it, ffs).

There's something powerful in hub computers, but not in the TV form. The
tabletop form was right all along - collaborating around a table enables kinds
of interactions that are not possible on a white board (notably by using
physical objects in conjunction with the tabletop). The SUR-40 had the
ambition of being usable both in whiteboard and table mode, but that's
probably overdoing it. Interested to see where this goes, but the high price
tag makes me doubtful. Make a $999 coffee table computer that every nerd can
have in their living room to play boardgames, use to swap vacation
photos/movies between phones and beam them up to the TV, collaborate on
floorpans, etc. and you may have something.

~~~
joshuapants
I remember when I first heard of the original Surface I was desperate to own
one and followed every bit of news I could find. I do hope that future
iterations of the hub will revisit the table paradigm, though now that I've
cooled down my nerd lust I do realize that there may be some ergonomic
concerns. Having to lean over a table to see the display properly could be a
literal pain in the neck over the long term.

~~~
edgarvaldes
I would love a hybrid between a drawing board, a Surface table, and...
something else. I mean, not for programing but more for another, art-oriented,
tasks.

------
fencepost
I like that they're making it in the US and that they didn't just knee-jerk
"OK, who are we having make it?"

Actually, I'm kind of liking a variety of things that MS has been doing
lately. Heck, if I was going to start on mobile development I might actually
start with the (much smaller) Windows ecosystem rather than trying to bubble
to the top of the iOS or Android markets - the absolute number of users may be
smaller, but if you do a good job the number that actually see and can
purchase your app may be a lot higher than you'll see as you compete against
300 similar apps on the larger markets. Further, if MS keeps doing a decent
job while Apple and Google work to find ways to irritate users and developers
it may end up being an "in on the ground floor" type of option.

------
joezydeco
It's somewhat telling that Microsoft had to build their own captouch factory
to produce sensing circuits of this size. Either Asian factories couldn't do
it or, more likely, they _wouldn 't_ do it for the small quantity and massive
BOM and scrap % involved at this size.

------
ChuckMcM
I really think something like this, if not this, is the future of engineering.
Sometimes I think people underestimate the value of having a big space to
"push around" various bits on and think things through. Having the resolution
to be able to do that at scale means being able to walk up and have a high
resolution photograph be literally 4" x 7" on an 84" diagonal screen would
change everything.

Assuming 4K screens though, this is only 52PPI on the 84" model. And you would
ideally want 200+ dpi. Not that anyone is going to make 84" 16K screens
anytime soon (interestingly they are "possible" in that the manufacturing is
known, but without an embedded data channel you would not be able to get data
to them quickly enough.

~~~
michaelbuddy
what? you don't need 200 dpi when you're 3-8 feet away

~~~
stephengillie
But you do when you're 1-3 feet away.

How about we make a system that only utilizes (for example) 8x8 "chunks" of
pixels. We can put distance sensors on the display; if anything gets close
enough, it can "downshift" to 1x1 pixels.

~~~
NeutronBoy
> But you do when you're 1-3 feet away

It's not like a regular screen that's 1-2 feet away, where you're reading 9-12
point fonts all day. This is a collaborative table, that's going to have
multiple people standing around it. Sizes of things will be bigger so people
can read them from further away, upside down, etc.

------
joe_the_user
Outside a conference room, I can't think of any compelling use for the thing
except dungeons and dragons. But I _really_ want it for that.

------
jayshahtx
It's nice to see this make the headlines, I was at Microsoft M&A group in 2012
when the acquisition became public. Satya has received a lot of praise for the
direction Microsoft has been going in, but I still feel that some of the
groundwork was laid by Steve. PPI is a good example with the acquisition
becoming public in summer of 2012.

When most people today talk about Steve, they often make it sound like he was
aloof to the needs of the industry, the fact that Microsoft needed to be re-
organized, etc. I don't feel like he didn't know these things, but more-so
that it took a change of leadership to rally the company with different goals.
[edited to add more commentary]

------
dba7dba
_Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. "We
have invented a new technology called multi-touch," he boasted, in one of the
more reality-distorting things ever said during an Apple keynote. Han, by
contrast, had been careful to share credit in his TED talk: "I'm not the only
one doing it, there are a lot of people doing it."_

I remember that. I had watched Mr Han's demo a while back BEFORE the iPhone
announcement.

------
felipeerias
There are many exciting openings for creating augmented workspaces. But they
are probably not around massive and massively expensive devices like this one
(even if Microsoft has carried out some really good research along the way).
IMHO, the focus should be on designing small and modular components that could
be appropriated, recombined, and adapted to each concrete case.

------
justonepost
Using wall as the display makes way more sense to me:
[http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-envisions-pc-as-projector-
wit...](http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-envisions-pc-as-projector-with-your-
wall-as-the-display/)

~~~
stephengillie
It's another idea that's been proposed. I think we might be waiting for the
technology to catch up, or a flashy implementation to excite everyone.

Bill Gates proposed using the wall as a display in a 2009 talk he gave at UW
Seattle - he said he saw it as something that was definitely going to happen
eventually, it was a question of when. And the idea has been presented
fictionally in Fahrenheit 451, if not before.

------
Roritharr
What i really, REALLY, would like to Know is what happened to the PixelSense
Technology of the Sur40 Display.

You could put a document face-down on it and have a scan immediately
available. How amazing would this be on a Surface Tablet, or Hub

