Slashdot Mirror
Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype
Barence writes "Microsoft has literally added another dimension to its touchscreen table technology Surface. The new table projects an image through the table itself, so that any translucent material (such as tracing paper or perspex) held above the Surface screen displays a different image to what you see on the table's display. This means you can have a satellite image of a town on the table, and have the street names projected on to a piece of paper that the user holds above the map. Or you could have a photo of a car, with the tracing paper displaying images of its innards."
so how is it any different from the Surface? anybody can put a paper with different stuff on top of a lit up table.
until it's patented?
On another note, will it run Vista Embedded?
proud caffeine whore
So... it can display a second image that is completely invisible unless I hold a piece of paper in front of it.
Is it just me or does that sound kind of silly?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
A bigger ass table!
Task Mangler
WHO. GIVES. A. DAMN?
Microsoft's flash competitor mmorpg that works on tracing paper
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Someone, somewhere will make porn out of it.
booooring
Everyone on Slashdot except for you.
So essentially what they've invented is a hardware implementation of what I can already do on any ordinary screen: superimpose one translucent image on top of another.
Can anyone suggest how this is really advantageous, other than perhaps the novelty aspect of it?
are you really that disgruntled with your own life? you sound like a lonely little loser.
Is actually laying off people as a result of the supposed economic crisis and yet still wasting away resources on Surface. We're wasting money on this crap because our new manager wants to be all "trendy" and make us look like some sort of cutting age IT outfit. I'd rather us keep on doing what we already do and have been highly profitable at instead of wasting time and money on this type of toy product and ruining people's lives in the process. There were some people who found out they were loosing their job by watching the evening news, but we still have enough money to buy and maintain electronic tables. Horrible.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I am a concerned citizen concerned that Italians might use this powerful technology to communicate with our CHILDREN and implant their nefarious ICES on them. I support freedom of speech but as long as there are italians, there will have to be some reasonable limits and this technology from Microsoft is just too powerful. Think of the children, falling haplessly into the hands of the Italians with their nefarious ices! Bah!
Seems pointless to me.
If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?
Then it's always available regardless of whether you happen to have a nearby supply of tracing paper with the proper translucency characteristics.
And then it's equally visible with the main image, from all angle and lighting conditions, because it is in fact the main image.
Actually I don't understand why you'd only want street names displayed only with a small rectangular area, rather than toggling them on and off across the entire image.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Do not stare into table with remaining eye."
[
Sounds like pretty standard form of glyph tracking, similar to those outlandish "magic boards" the news networks seem to like playing around with to beguile the audience with more of the shiny.
8==8 Bones 8==8
He's bitter beacuse he's dyslexic, and to add insult to injury he name himself "moniker" when he meant to type "monkier".
a touchscreen chair? what, the prototype was destroyed before testing could be completed?
Now, I can display one image on the large-format table, while I struggle to manually hold a 36" x 48" piece of frigging tracing paper a few inches over it, thereby rendering the tracing-paper image impractical, and the other image invisible!
Damn! Why didn't I think of that?? I would be RICH!!!
Rich, I tell you!
on Lost in Space? It even wrapped everything in tidy plastic bundles.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
That was f'in funny!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
You can find it in TFA, but if you're like I usually am and don't read it... there is a video, just to let those interested know...
http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/video/SecondLight.wmv
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
This is Unix!
You can't handle the truth.
Its fucking cool technology. Don't let fanboyism ruin this. Its a big table, its expensive. But its still fucking cool. Have you forgotten you are nerds? Who gives a shit how useful it is? Aren't people always arguing pro research that isn't about making a buck. Now when 'evil' microsoft does something all nerds like (making cool shit without having purely profit in mind) what happens? You bash it? I expect better :S
Making computer screens out of $10,000 coffee tables for $2,000,000 home refinancers is so 2006. It's time for tent screen prototypes for the renters.
I don't know who would use it... how about Doctors?
Imagine a multi-layer X-ray of a patient, which you can move in and out of, just by moving your fingers... very useful. Especially during an operation. Remember, this is just the "first attempt".
After years of reading slashdot this was the first message i actually lol'd
Is there another Slashdot that has intellectual people exchanging intelligent ideas about new products and developments in society? I would very much like to visit that site. This one seems to be the karma whoring, Microsoft bashing, +5 funny site. It is very boring and predictable. TIA.
A great many people on this site don't want to believe MS could do anything cool or useful or innovative. Thus when they do produce something, it has to be hated on. If this was coming from Google, I'd give good odds that the grand parent would be gushing over how cool it was and all the neat things it could do.
That is, unfortunately, one of the things you'll get in the Slashdot comments. People let their bias of the source influence their appraisal of the technology. MS is the big evil, so their stuff gets hated on even when, or perhaps especially when, it is the only stuff that can do it.
If they can send out an image that the isn't picked up unless there's a piece of paper on it, how far are they from sending out *lots* of images, each of which is only visible on a specific medium?
Once that's down, surely you just make lots of layers, "addressable" by their properties, i.e. which image each layer will display, and you've got 3d no?
Is it wrong of me to immediately think of D&D and this technology?
Since the picture can move with the paper, I can imagine having goblins pop out of no where when I toss a bunch of 1x1" pieces of paper on to the table. Then using the motion sensor part of this tech, the images move with the paper around on the terrain already displayed on the table.
I know my wife would prefer this table to having a projector permanently over our dining table.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
This is cool technology, but if it can sense the location of IR-reflective objects on the table it doesn't need to actually project anything onto the paper. You could simply lay a frame on the table so it could sense the corners of the frame, then composite the image onto the display as if the frame was a sheet of paper. Then the transparency of the paper can be handled in software, you don't need the special surface, and you can have as many "sheets of paper" as you want.
Projecting onto objects above the table is cool, but not super practical. The "IR Mouse" is really more interesting.
apparently you guy's just see this as a cheap party trick, do you realize how this will revolutionize the desktop, gaming, and computing in the future, using this same technology and the laws of refraction, you can have a truly 3d desktop, it brings computing out of the monitor and onto the... 'surface', for instance, i saw them demonstrate a short cylinder with the words 'Hello World!' scrolling around it, now if you can't tell what that means for gaming, there's something wrong with you and you should be ashamed to call yourself a geek/nerd, whatever you may be
If it rhymes it must be true.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
And then take this sheet of tracing paper and look at these other works!
DESPAIR!!!
-=Bang Bang=-
I've been waiting to upgrade my current Microsoft Surface Table for forever - can't wait to pick this one up!
This is just like the Magnavox Odyssey I had as a kid.
Why isn't the Research and Development for Teh Lunix working on stuff like this?
Oh, that's right... no funding. Doh! Hoisted by our own FOSS petards.
This was displayed at Siggraph.
I think it is enormously clever, while at the same time enormously useless.
It was pretty obvious that they had no way to know where the paper was, so they mostly demonstrated it as an x-ray into the image that was on the screen. I do not see any reason why the paper's location could not be determined by the touch detector, however.
I would think any practical use could be done by software moving a virtual "paper". One thing this would do is allow the papers to overlap.
The already have a little device that eliminates that step: sockclips. (Not intended to be a commercial endorsement.)
"Its fucking cool technology. Don't let fanboyism ruin this." If you're a nerd then you should damn well know better than celebrate anything Microsoft does with respect to their "intellectual property" advancement. What makes you think that profit isn't the motive here? Intellectual property in the very least is future leverage against competing technology and will very likely be wielded by this company against competing technology.
It could have been Sun, IBM, Xerox, etc., it honestly doesn't matter. The response to the product here in Slashdot of all places says enough. There are enough people on this topic alone who can see the benefits. So, it doesn't matter who came up with the idea really. Sometimes you've just got to roll with it.
Less TV-tables and more graphics cards that'll do Bioshock with ray tracing please Lolosoft. If I want a touchscreen table, I'll go watch next-gen.
Alright, so maybe I do want touchscreen wallpanels.