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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."
If they're presenting it then you can be assured that it is already patent pending.
Which means its been in the lab for about 2 years already.. so in another 8 it might be on the market - but it'll be (more) boring by then, so it won't.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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!
That's what I want to know.
Clearly I'm missing something obvious, but other than looking cool, is there any practical advantage to this?
It would seem that the very thing that makes it look cool -- that "added dimension" -- is also going to mean that the way in which the images are superimposed varies depending on where you're standing. The only way the roads in that "road map" idea would be in the right place is if you were hovering directly over the table -- except you'd be blocking the projector, and it still wouldn't be right towards the edges of the table.
I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
No, you can set the paper directly onto the table.
And use a transparency, allowing you to see the bottom image as well. Not that this seems incredibly useful to me in the described application, but it could become an interesting capability.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Every good employee you have is an already selected and prescreened applicant for other jobs you might need done. He or she is already familiar with the company, knows many of the other employees, and you've already completed a bunch of paperwork on them. If he or she were lazy or inefficient or crooked, presumably you would have fired them, not waited until there was an excuse to lay them off. When you lay them off, they go elsewhere, and then when you need another job done, you have to pick from a bunch of unscreened applicants, fill out new paperwork, train somebody in the basics of your corporate culture, and re-incur a lot of costs you already paid once. Doing a lot of layoffs is basically committing to shrink for months after the cause of the layoffs ends, months in which a smart competitor may grow. Something like increases in efficiency should mean your company will grow, and therefore need more people in the long run. Layoffs there are the same as betting your increased efficiency won't, by itself, improve your bottom line.
Who is John Cabal?
this is pretty cool stuff, it allows the user to display an image on the table of say a building, and different people (say engineers working on different sections like plumbing and electrical) can throw on their own parts of the plans to see if they are going to conflict and to easily show others. having actually worked on large projects where one of the biggest hurdles is inter discipline co operation i can see a real use for this.
if this was apple developing it i'm guessing you'd all be masturbating over it by now.....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Except, of course, every time you come in, you have to enunciate "honey Mustard, not honey Roasted", and she still can't find the Honey Mustard Chicken button on the cash register, even though you're staring right at it, and you've ordered it before, and you've seen her press it before.
I'll take the table.
--Edward Dassmesser