A Look Beneath the 'Surface'

Hajsky writes "Ars Technica takes a closer look at Microsoft's new "Surface" tabletop device. Turns out that Surface isn't actually a touchscreen at all, but uses five cameras located in the table's base to record movement and touch. 'The five cameras are near-infrared devices, but that's not because they are trying to read heat signatures from fingertips (or other body parts) on the table. Instead, it's because the entire surface of Surface is bathed in light; by illuminating the top of the table, the cameras can easily see when things are placed on it. Shining colored light across the surface of the table would spoil the effect that Microsoft wants, so near-infrared light is used for invisible illumination.' The whole setup runs on a Core 2 Duo and off-the-shelf hardware, and can handle 52 simultaneous touches." jfanning wrote with a link to an overview of similar technology used in the Helsinki 'CityWall'. The article she provides discusses the unique public display, and has an in-depth video on the way these kinds of setups work.

Comments

The frustrations of parallax

[G4from128k]

I can't help but wonder how they will compensate for parallax between users' eyes, fingertips, and the screen objects. I'd imagine that the display panel will be relatively thick for structural reasons and that most users will be sitting far off the central axis of the table (i.e., the coffee-table scenario). This means that the image on the screen will be displaced with respect to the line sight from eyeball to fingertip. Moreover different people sitting around the table will see different parallax displacements between fingertips and the screen. Without some compensation for this, the device will be frustrating to use because it won't be intuitive as to where to touch the table top to "touch" an underlying display object. People will often touch the screen where they think they should only to find they've grabbed the object next to the one they really wanted.

P.S. Acrylic is a horrible choice of material for the top as it scratches too easily.

Gorilla arm

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Does anybody remember the HP touchscreen computer (from back in the Lisa days) which bombed miserably because people couldn't hold their arms up for hours on end? The thing about a mouse or trackball is that a little motion produces a lot of motion of the cursor - without fatigue.

Gaming?

[Shadow Wrought]

Could this be a forerunner of a gaming tabletop? All the terrain, units and record keeping are kept for you as you play on a largish surface. Could be pretty cool.

Re:Applications for the Table

[Irish_Samurai]

Man, I can think of a ton of things that I could write myself using XNA.

• Specialized drink glass code that you could play drinking games with (russian roulette comes to mind)
• Almost every board game ever made
• Air Hockey
• A MTG interface
• If there was a way to start manufacturing items, or self encoding, with the domino encoding on them, writing an app that queries wikipedia when the item is placed on it to give you a neato little "Identify" effect
• Take the same idea as above, but it allows you to purchase said item directly from the vendor by tapping you credit card on the table. Cool if you have people visiting or if you are at someone elses house.
• Another layer of immersion with certain types of digital media (travel shows can display interactive maps without using up viewing real estate, ect...)
• Multi user story telling - Essentially choose your own adventure where everyone was a character and chose from a list of actions to dynamically create a story or show.
• Virtual turntables
• A real time map of my house with live feeds from webcams actually playing in the roomspace
• A tool that allows you to generate custom tabletop game boards and rule structures on the fly. Lego men now have another use!
• A visual warehouse management tool
• Virtual home decorating swatches (although the screen and projection tech may need to catch up on that one)

I could go on and on. None of this is really mindblowing, but there could be a very decent cottage industry popping up around this one item alone.