
Microsoft gears up to mass produce large-screen touch displays - funkyy
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-gears-up-to-mass-produce-large-screen-touch-displays-7000033257/
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count
Using a combo of two of those 55" PP displays at a MSFT meeting the other day
was _amazing_. Drawing with the pens and being able to touch-interact with the
screens as giant whiteboards, then click a button and emailing a pdf of the
whole thing to everyone, while having PPT and Lync video conference on the
other was simply awesome. I _need_ that whiteboard capability. It's so much
less 'janky' than smart boards and stuff (mostly because of the pixel density,
the multi-interaction (pen is different than finger, etc.), and no projection
required. It just feels natural/right - everybody loved it.

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endtime
How much of that is about the hardware vs. the software? How much of the
positive experience would be preserved if you ran the same software on a
Surface Pro 3 and just cast the screen to a large monitor?

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rbanffy
I feel allowing anyone on the meeting sharing the document and being allowed
to draw on it from their seats would be awesome.

Where I work, we use Google Docs to conduct meetings and on-the-spot polls
with up to 30 people (more than that tends to block the document) on different
geographic locations.

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count
That sounds neat, but I'm a huge fan of pointing and moving around like a
crazy person in front of the whiteboard :)

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Renaud
If the price is right, there could be a whole ecosystem using these big
displays.

Imagine every family owning one where they can easily access kids activity
schedules, pin lists of groceries, track chores, to do litst that could sync
with every family member's phone (for those old enough),...

This could completely replace the fridge magnets and the pin board, and it
could be an excellent way for younger kids to interact with educational
content.

It could also server as a communication point for younger kids who are too
young to have their own phone/tablet, be able to call each-others under
supervision, ...

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noonespecial
I love technology. I totally want what you just described; but if you don't
have a "family whiteboard" get one now. Even if its just the low-tech kind
with markers. I can't tell you how awesome it is to watch my (gradeschool age)
kids sketch their ideas after being brought up with ours.

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moron4hire
I have a friend who painted an entire wall in his house with blackboard paint,
to be used with chalk. It's actually rather gorgeous. The kid isn't old enough
yet to draw on it, but we certainly had a lot of fun with it :)

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k__
The parents of my girlfriend just let her draw on the walls when she was young
(<4).

After the years it got hidden behind furniture, because she was so small back
then and couldn't draw >1m.

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delbel
Aside from some niche markets such as airport displays and kiosks, I think
this is a bad bet on Microsoft's overall strategy. I don't see a demand for
these systems anytime soon. Disclaimer: today I was in a meeting where the
projector had a touch screen and we only used it twice in the meeting.
Although I was 1200 miles away from the meeting room and thought it was cool,
it really was a gimmick when it came down to it. We never used it. I can
almost see how this went down in a VP meeting at Microsoft "We'll make bigger
brighter display and corner the market!" Unless someone can point out a real
problem they are solving here, I'm betting in two years we will see Microsoft
abandon the platform and all of the developers who invested their time into
this flawed vision.

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feadog
Something that's a standing desk/tilted drafting desk form factor combined
with good palm/elbow/forearm recognition would immediately address the
"gorilla arm" problem with such interfaces. Combine that with Reactable-style
tool objects, and input from cameras and/or a Kinect, primarily in order to
make the system "smarter" about how to interpret touch, and I could see some
really revolutionary interfaces for applications that are amenable to a data-
flow style model.

(Applications where you have boxes connected by pipes/arrows to other boxes.)

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userbinator
I don't see large touchscreens being suited for anything other than whiteboard
replacements and maybe exercise games - the amount of effort needed to
interact with one that's much larger than a typical tablet (~12") becomes
tiring quite quickly. In comparison, traversing a large screen with a mouse
requires not much more than a small wrist movement.

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seanmcdirmid
Tables only made sense if they were used collaboratively, which is why I think
that is why early Classic Surface focused on that.

We have tables you can write on with a marker, I don't see why, if cheap
enough, adding a digital layer would be unwelcome (but not yet, of course).

Using a mouse with a very large screen is a recipe for serious neck strain.
Sure, you can move the cursor quickly, but your head still has to track it. I
know, I've tried!

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WalterBright
What I've wanted for the last 35 years is my actual desktop to be a display.

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stinos
Yes! Although it would have to be tilted then, the far end of a typical 90cm
wide desk is hard to reach, and probably just as hard to read if it would be a
screen.

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eruditely
I personally have been itching for an affordable touchscreen that I could do
much with. I have needed a touchscreen to augment my work space for a while
now.

So here's a counterexample.

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niels_olson
I was actually wishing we had something like this for our lego league team
(team 2600 ftw!) It would be great for that sort of language. I just don't see
hanging a $7500 display in my garage.

However, if MSFT/PPI would like to donate one, we would surely find a place
for them on our team shirt!

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asgard1024
Touch display? Nah, don't need it. But it would be nice if someone made a
cheap netbook with a display of similar resolution that tablets have.

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gtirloni
I thought netbooks were dead. Is it about the price?

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rbanffy
More likely they died unnatural deaths.

Netbooks became a very price-conscious segment that cannibalized sales from
higher-end ultra-thin notebooks.

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sneak
How cool would this be for controlling a synthesizer/sequencer? Totally killer
for arranging music visually.

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anigbrowl
That's exactly what I'd like to do with it (although since I have a lot of
hardware, I would also like Microsoft to fix its appalling Windows MIDI
drivers, for God's sake). I don't see this being that affordable in the short
term but I would absolutely love to work with something like this for both
audio and video.

I think there'll be plenty of demand if they can bring it in at a competitive
price and it's sufficiently responsive. Of course it will be in niche markets
at first but I have no problem thinking of use cases. My day job is recording
and editing sound for film and when your timeline runs to a couple of hours
with maybe 40 active tracks (and that's on a small project) then even the best
control surface has trouble keeping up, you keep having to switch channels or
pages to deal with all the virtualized mixer controls, plugins and whatnot -
not to mention that that amount of dedicated hardware costs a fortune. A
table-sized work surface with a good haptic grammar would make that jobs
_vastly_ easier. I imagine the same is true for anyone working in VFX with its
similarly elaborate pipelines.

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fleshweasel
Looking cool in movies and in corporate and university lobbies is not enough.
Microsoft really needs to cut the shit and start focusing on producing a
product that's actually desirable to a wide market--something they've only
gotten worse at in the last few years, outside of their programming languages.

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ahelwer
(Disclaimer, msft employee) The surface is legitimately useful as a complete
replacement for paper & pen. I never even touched looseleaf during my last
semester at university. Plus the pro 3 has a large enough screen to make it
useful for coding.

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eruditely
I am interested to hear how you utilize the surface for a pen and paper
replacement. I want something portable that works for a notebook, but I don't
see it replacing a laptop for me. Care to expand?

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ahelwer
Surface pen + OneNote is pretty magical. It's the first thing I show people
when they ask to try my surface, and they're always blown away. So basically I
just write on there instead of using paper & pen. As an aside, I also like
using the pen to draw diagrams for presentations, instead of using Visio or
whatever. People pay more attention to the hand-drawn look, I find.

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dang
Url changed from [http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-
produce...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-produce-its-
big-ass-touchscreens/), which points to this.

