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

ICARS predicted this!

[morgan_greywolf]

ICARS -- the interactive touch-screen displays seen on Star Trek: The Next Generation and later shows predicted this as far back as what? 1986 or 1987 or something? And now it's here for real.

I see this as ideal for collaboration. Gather a bunch of people around the big screen and they can all make changes in realtime. Very nice.

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: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:ICARS predicted this!

[EatHam]

And now we're supposed to just sit back and watch as we all get our arms broken by sore loser wookies? No fucking thank you, I'll stick with my monitor.

Re:ICARS predicted this!

[CodeBuster]

One of the interesting things about Star Trek is that the concepts frequently exceeded the ability of the set designers or the prop builders to keep up. If you get some of the coffee table books where they include some of the concept and designer notes from when say TNG, DS9, Voyager, or even Enterprise were being developed they include such items as three dimensional holographic displays, completely voice actuated systems with no buttons or control panels at all (ruled too advanced for 24th century at the time of TNG...the audience wouldn't buy it). So what actually ended up the screen was not always exactly what the producers wanted, but what they were able to do on time and in budget with the resources that they had available at the time. The user interface concepts shown in Star Trek are generally very forward looking and include many features which eventually make their way into real world systems in one form or another even if the physics and other scientific concepts are somewhat less convincingly portrayed (i.e. Star Trek physics...ugh).

The future is here...

[PietjeJantje]

More big ass tables!

shadows

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

No, but you do get big shadowhands when you use the touch surface. If they found a way to do this with two projectors, though, you'd probably be able to avoid even that (though alignment/convergence issues would be a bitch).

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:shadows

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Reading between the lines, they say the projector is "inches" away from the table. The only way I can see that working is if the projector is off to one side and has massive keystone correction. So you will get shadows from fingers that touch the surface, but not from heads or hands that are above the table by more than a few inches.

Wii guy will do this!

[altoz]

I'm just waiting for the wii guy to do the same thing for like $5

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:Wii guy will do this!

[theheadlessrabbit]

fuck! now I'm gonna get modded down -1 Redundant.

and it's going to happen to me twice, cause I posted this acknowledgement of my redundancy.

how do i make this +1 insightful... ...um....something about how in soviet russia, chuck norris welcomes his grits-eating natalie portman overlord while throwing a chair at an insensitive clot....because all your memes are belong to me?

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.

Microsoft already did this

[Xest]

Microsoft has done surface without the table, in fact, that's how the whole tech started off.

See here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujhFInvyxo

or here:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/03/microsoft_research_techfe.html

It's the original demonstration from where the current surface stemmed.

A specific table isn't essential to the surface concept.

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

So it's a smartboard on its side...

[millia]

So it's an interactive whiteboard on the table instead of the wall. Aka, activboard, smartboard, mimio.
Well, okay, it's multi-touch instead of single touch, but it's still not *that* fancy.

BTW, those short throw projectors use a crazy fisheye lens to avoid keystoning. From our experience with them in the aforementioned whiteboards, the picture isn't as clear as a regular projector, and it's harder than normal to get good focus. When you're very near to the board, it gets quite noticeable.

education

[apodyopsis]

they don't half hard on about the education market for this new projector on some of the other sites mentioning it.

I was taught in an old fashioned British school with blackboards, chalk, uniforms and traditional methods. Is it just me who thinks that emphasis on gadgets like this will simply cost schools money and distract from the subject matter of the lesson.

By all means get the whizzy gadgetry, but remember that its no substitute for competent teachers and a well planned curriculum.

Of course this is /. and this comment is slightly off topic, so feel free to mode me to oblivion...

Re:education

[SargentDU]

I was in a military school in the 1970's (1979 actually) where the instructor used markers on a white board and
pressed a button on the whiteboard and then passed out handouts with the screen drawing on it. He pressed
another button and a wiper passed across the board and restored it to all white so he could write and draw as
he pleased. It did not get in the way of education, in fact, it facilitated the instructor and his efforts.

Who's worse ...

[robertmc]

CNET for getting the technology wrong or /. for saying it's Toshiba not Hitachi? Standards sinking ...

orientation

[hey]

I think you'd get backache if you learned of over a Surface-like thing for a while.
Maybe the answer is to flip it up horizontal.
To avoid the cost of a touch screen (or sensors) you might instead use a mouse on a flat surface like a desk.
That would be one awesome system!

Microsoft Surface is not about the table

[El Cabri]

The actual hardware is not what Microsoft is after with the Surface, but rather the software, development platform and user experience. For all of these prototypes that explore various ways of bringing the image to any big flat surface and to track the user's touch, all of them show you how to use google maps, and then their ad-hoc photo shuffling application, and that's all. None of them has yet any real useful application or complete SDK with hardware support abstracted.

You're confused about attention spans

[blueZ3]

It may be that children are paying more attention to the large TV at the front of the room (what these things really are) than they were to the teacher, but my take is that much like the 5-second cuts in current TV shows, bright flashy colors and animation isn't "improving" anyone's attention span. For non-animated, non-colored, non-audio presentation of information (you know, those things called "books" or most of the "real" content on the Internet) this is likely to have an adverse affect. As television clearly shows, it is quite possible to increase attention (what you meant to say) while shortening attention spans (what is happening with TV and things like interactive presentations in the classroom).

I'm a former teacher and was the "technology mentor" at my school. During my time teaching one of my greatest frustrations was watching elementary school teachers use PowerPoint to deaden both the interest in computers and the interest in subject matter. A good teacher can help kids have fun learning with a chalkboard. A bad one can kill a child's interest no matter what wonderful tool you provide.

Having the attention span of a two-year-old after three bowls of chocolate-frosted sugar bombs is what politicians really want from the electorate. War not going too well? Oh, look! Brittany sans undergarments! Socialized medicine a terrible idea? Wow! Look at the snow in the Northeast. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.