"A sheet of glass" can be pretty thick. What does that statement even mean? Anyway this sounds totally awesome if it ever becomes available and I would love for MS to push the industry in this direction. However, I doubt very much they'll deliver on this. Cool projects rarely make it out of MS Research, sadly.
Also, it seems like they're pretty far behind the times on this. Three years is a long time, and it seems likely that the industry will change significantly before then. Apple or HTC could easily come out with a similar device before MS hits the market.
These researchers seem very disconnected from the market. What hardware have they shipped that people want to buy?
They should take a queue from Apple and have small teams or individuals working on a 10-3-1 process - make 10 different prototypes where everyone can go wild, the 3 best of those are further developed, then a final polished iteration from those.
I think you've confused research with product development.
The person being interviewed is not a product developer. He is a computer scientist who did pioneering research in touch interfaces going back the to '70s.
>Apple or HTC could easily come out with a similar device before MS hits the market.
Sure, but that is if they see it as viable. Unless it's just an add-on secondary input device and display, it'll require that the OS and apps all work really well with it. So there's the big issue... would it work great with existing software or require a fresh start? Can it work well for mainstream use including things like word processing?
The work doesn't seem particularly new. If one looks closely at the first picture "Bill Buxton using the Active Desk he helped develop at the University of Toronto" we can see the older Apple color icon at the top left.
Of course it still is a very cool technology to respect and admire even if existing OSes aren't quite ready for it.
The biggest problem I see with touch interfaces on legacy OSes is that they can work better on large screens, but don't scale down well.
There have been many rumors (patent applications) that Apple intend to have their iMac line act as a tablet. With a large capacitive screen and iOS (In addition to OSX), which effectively would act as Microsoft surface, just with mature software.
My bet is that we will see an Apple surface before a Microsoft one.
Of course you wouldn't be able to see the screen for all the stickers saying: "designed for windows glass", "windows home semi-starter- premium edition (bathroom only not kitchen edition)", "intel inside" etc ....
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.
The problem I see with putting sensors in the pixels is that you're going to need to light that pixel up to use the sensor. How do you sense touch or image in a black section of the screen?
"The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there’s a fourth pixel in every triad. So there’s red, green, and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff; go the other direction."
Yeah, because Surface has been so successful and doesn't mirror anything the DIY crowd hasn't been doing for years and for thousands less, because the tech is so simple. That's a good reason to tech it up further, so you can crank the cost up further - that'll make it sell!
Not holding my breath on this one. Not even taking a deeper breath than normal.
I think the interesting points from the article aren't what they can do now but what they want to do in the future.
The researcher seems most interested in the bits about the fourth "capture" pixel built into the LCD-something much harder to DIY. The possibilities of this tech would be very wide ranging-much more so than a big table with projectors and cameras in it (surface).
Reactable has been around for a while: http://www.reactable.com/ (if nothing else, the first page of results found youtube vids from 2006)
There's this one, plus many more, from Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Interactive-Multitouch-Displ... Many of the projects there come in well below $500 for absolutely everything, and there are a few software libraries for detecting multitouch built specifically for devices like these (reflected IR light) because the technique is so cheap and simple.
I realize it's a different piece of hardware than the one he's describing, but it's still at least a little funny that the picture toward the top has him drawing on a device running Mac OS.
Also, it seems like they're pretty far behind the times on this. Three years is a long time, and it seems likely that the industry will change significantly before then. Apple or HTC could easily come out with a similar device before MS hits the market.