Hitachi Does Microsoft Surface Without the Table

An anonymous reader writes "According to CNET.co.uk, who randomly stumbled into a booth at CES, Toshiba has created a Microsoft Surface-type system without the unwieldy table. 'The StarBoard system is really two technologies in one. Firstly, it features Hitachi's short-throw LCD projector. This is important, because the projector sits mere inches from the interactive surface. This means you get a huge — 50-inch, in fact — bright screen, which doesn't get blocked out by your head as you lean over the table. The image it projects is incredibly high-quality too, and there was no noticeable distortion.' The video attached to the article shows the system in action." It should be noted that the implication that leaning over the table blocks a projection from above is spurious; the Surface projects an image from below. The 'overhead' setup at CES was a camera designed to show onlookers what was taking place on the table.

Comments

Re:Wii guy will do this!

[danielcolchete]

He already did: it's a project called "Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote" located at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/.

Re:shadows

[gEvil (beta)]

And if you'd read the article and watched the video, you'd see that Zonk's comment really has no place here, since he's talking about how the MS Surface works. The Hitachi system demonstrated here is very much a short-throw projector that projects the image downwards onto the surface (hence negating the need for a full-table solution, as the MS one requires). Unless they've figured out a way for light to travel through opaque objects, you will get shadows.

Re:shadows

[nherc]

If you'd RTFA and not just RTFS, you'd see the summary was bollocksed and the editors are either still half asleep or in the same boat as you.

From the article linked in the summary with my comments in parentheses:

The StarBoard system is really two technologies in one. Firstly, it features Hitachi's short-throw LCD projector. This is important, because the projector sits mere inches from the interactive surface (on top of the table/surface, which is clearly seen in the video). This means you get a huge -- 50-inch, in fact -- bright screen, which doesn't get blocked out by your head as you lean over the table (but it is blocked by your hands touching/near the surface as the parent talks about and again as seen in the video).
...
The surface itself is simply a rigid board (it's difficult to project an image through a board from my understanding of physics). At the top there are two cameras that track the movement of your hands.

Re:ICARS predicted this!

[B3ryllium]

LCARS, not ICARS. The "L" stands for Library.

Re:ICARS predicted this!

[vegiVamp]

I may be wrong - I'm only a regular trek viewer - but I don't remember any trek, even the most recent (Enterprise) or the farthest in the future (future federation timeships in Voyager and Enterprise) that clearly had multitouch interfaces. Touchscreen, yes, but not multitouch as in the typical picture-rotate-and-resize demos we get these days.

If those kinds of interfaces were pictured and imagined since back then, I think they'd have been implemented years back as well. Palo Alto et al were quite the innovators. No, the first occurence of that type of interface I remember seeing is in Minority Report.

Re:Wii guy will do this!

[RemyBR]

I believe he already did something at least similar. See the multi-point interactive white boards at his page.

Re:ICARS predicted this!

[daenris]

While the first mass-media use may have been in Minority Report, research on multi-touch systems goes back at least to the mid-80s, and quite possibly before. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Re:Microsoft already did this

[Foresto]

Are you sure the whole tech was started off by Microsoft? I saw at least one project using this sort of tech before I had ever heard of Surface.

http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReacTable