
Microsoft Surface 2 is real and it looks amazing - solipsist
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/01/06/microsoft-surface-2-is-real-and-it-looks-amazing/
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joshu
The future is here. It's a big-ass table.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY>

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drusenko
VentureBeat has a video of the presentation here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36rm5yS4c4>

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bvi
For a presentation on product that looks as incredible as this, the transition
of the presentation on to Ballmer was slightly awkward.

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drusenko
That's exactly what I thought. If Steve Jobs had been presenting he would have
been constantly interrupted with applause. Instead, a botched presentation on
a very cool product.

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BorisBomega
But are Apple fans just more vocal, is Ballmer not as good on stage, or are
Microsoft's products less interesting?

Or all of the above? Just asking...

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bvi
To me, it appears to be more than just Jobs vs Ballmer (though that would be a
hands-down victory for Jobs, no doubt).

The product was fascinating; it is well worthy of thunderous applause instead
of the smattering of claps it received. The way the presentation ended: "I got
10, you got 10!" was pretty cringe-worthy, if you ask me.

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exception
Here's my first shot at a theory of how Pixel Sense might work

There is an IR LED backlight as well as the regular white backlight. They have
an additional per-pixel LCD shutter that blocks IR. The display repeatedly
displays sweeping horizontal and vertical patterns on the IR blocking
shutters. At the edges of the display there are a series of IR light
detectors. When an object is placed on the display, some IR light will bounce
off the object and be internally reflected in the plane of the panel glass.
The light is received by the detectors.

What think ye?

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throwaway_acc
Microsoft paid for the company I work for to show off the first Surface at a
consumer event last year, and from our experience they seemed pretty
indifferent.

There were microsoft staff on our stand to promote it, but they really
couldn't be assed, instead spending their time around other Microsoft products
that were much more consumer friendly.

We thought it was a pretty cool device, but visitors to the show seemed to
side with the MS staff, mostly showing indifference to what appeared much like
a glass table.

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InclinedPlane
Surface is a cool technology but it seems very cumbersome and obsolete
compared to capacitive multi-touch screens and things like kinect. It's form-
factor relegates it to only a niche of the potential market for touch-only UI
computing. And that I think will ultimately doom it. Market forces alone make
it more likely that Surface's niche will ultimately be filled by perhaps
oversized Android or iOS tablets than by Surface itself.

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snprbob86
RE: "seems very cumbersome and obsolete compared to capacitive multi-touch
screens"

There are fundamental advantages that the surface technology has, but
obtaining them (currently) requires the fundamental form factor disadvantage.
These would probably balance out, but Microsoft has failed to capitalize on
the advantages properly.

The advantages stem from the infrared camera hardware.

Advantage #1: Multi-user, not just multi-touch. You can see the direction that
hands are coming from, even when they aren't touching the table. This lets
clever software identify people, so that you could have UI pop up to face that
person. Different people can do different things with multiple focal points
and varying UI orientations.

Advantage #2: Identification of non-capacitive objects. For example, imagine a
car customization app. The idea being that you'd sit with a salesperson and
work through options together. Place a key on the table and a 3D model of the
car that matched that key would drive onto the scene and then park next to the
key.

Hopefully someone can figure out a form factor and price point that can
capitalize on these advantages.

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indexzero
lol. Does this mean my Surface projects are relevant again?

<https://github.com/indexzero/surface-raw-input>

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bradhe
used to work at MS and shared a building with the Surface team. Those people
were doing some REALLY amazing shit but I don't think it ever saw "the light
of day" (read: beyond demos) because the device was so damned expensive.

I did hear that a bunch of places in Vegas have active back orders, though...

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Misha_B
I think it has the potential to revolutionize drawing and resemble the
traditional drawing table. Can be very comfortable and efficient for anyone
designing physical objects (civil engineers, architects, industrial
designers). There are already graphic tablets, of course, but they are very
expensive and very specialized. This makes me hope that my current way of
working staring directly at the screen while moving the mouse might change in
a few years.

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po
It might have that potential but I think illustrators and architects will be
the last people to adopt it. If you've ever used the last version you would
see it was slow, imprecise, buggy, and gave you the feel that you were only
vaguely connected to the display. There will always be artists on the leading
edge of technology doing cool things, but for people who have jobs to get
done, this is one to wait on.

There is a restaurant here in Tokyo where each table is a surface. It took us
forever to order because we couldn't manipulate the menus. Our server had to
leave the table while taking orders to reboot it. It interpreted input as
chorded input because something or someone else was on the table turning pan
operations into zoom operations. Quite funny, not practical.

There are already tablet/monitor hybrids (and I mean digitizer tablets with
pressure sensitive pens) that don't suffer from the imprecision and accidental
input of this and I think they are somewhat popular with artists. A Microsoft
Surface, even an order of magnitude better than the last version isn't going
to cut it.

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samratjp
It's really cool for sure, but you know what this one man once said "Real
artists ship!" Too bad Microsoft didn't put this in a tablet eons ago.

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exception
Not sure why you are getting up-votes for this. It isn't adding anything to
the conversation other than obvious Microsoft bashing.

The Pixel Sense technology is obviously quite new, so I'm not sure how they
were supposed to put it in anything eons ago.

As far as Microsoft not shipping... Well they ship more stuff than a lot of
people. True that their tablet and phone offerings are not as good as the
competition (yet), but that isn't through not shipping, it's through creating
products that was out of touch with consumer expectations.

In the phone world, over the lifetime of the window Mobile, they've probably
been quite successful. In tablets, less so, but still they have shipped
numerous times over the past decade.

Just saying.

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samratjp
Microsoft didn't capitalize on Touch-based computing (a la Surface - didn't
imply about pixel sense at all) when they had the chance before.

Microsoft labs has a lot of crazy cool stuff, but they don't see daylight in
the hands of the consumer. There's something to be said about that.

The point is that they missed the boat, but shipped late.

"Gates's admission that he looked at the iPhone, unveiled three years ago in
January 2007 and which went on sale in June that year, and thought that
"Microsoft didn't aim high enough" is a startling revelation from the man who
drove the company to focus on mobile."
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-
bill-g...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-bill-gates-
microsoft-opinion-iphone) \- that says it all!

