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Hitachi Does Microsoft Surface Without the Table

Posted by Zonk on from the enless-variations-on-a-really-cool-theme dept.

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.

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. ICARS predicted this! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    My blog
    1. Re:ICARS predicted this! by daenris · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

  2. Re:Wii guy will do this! by danielcolchete · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/.

  3. Re:Wii guy will do this! by theheadlessrabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    --
    -I only code in BASIC.-
  4. Microsoft Surface is not about the table by El+Cabri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.