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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."
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'm sure some of the technology they developed for this is deserving of a patent (I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to patent some trivial/frivolous stuff, though). Patents aren't always bad, even for big corporations.
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
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 would suspect it can handle an image with a great number of layers, where the user could pick any one to be the layer that is projected through the first surface onto the upper surface. As quickly as a Photoshop type programs can manipulate layers, there are some real organizational uses for this. Any time you have a large group of people who need to schedule something complex together, being able to piecemeal copy many bits of information onto someone's basic instructions is handy, and that could certainly include paper.
For example, if you run a business, you are probably going to print employee schedules at least now and then. Imagine if a trainee employee wants to know who the most experienced fellow employee available is if he runs into something above his training. You could flick through the other schedule layers while they are projected onto his schedule, letting him make a few notes on his copy.
If there's already some printing on his copy, then what he adds by tracing will end up lined up with it if the rest is still lined up, so this prevents a lot of minor mistakes, such as copying a schedule change into the wrong box. In the same way, just about any minor change could be made swiftly, and with a reduced error rate, IF that change only needs to be copied by a few people. Obviously, if the same change or info needs to be added to 50 people's notes, it's faster in most cases to just tear up the old copies and reprint, but in a complex business the typical weekly meeting results mostly in changes that are simple and/or needed by only a few employees, so for a well organized business, where major changes don't often come up in short range planning, this will be useful. For less well organized business which buy it expecting it to help, when they make massive readjustments to policies and schedules just a few days out, this system won't help after all, and they are likely to be disappointed.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
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.
The projector projects from under the table using alternate frames on the surface. By applying current or not, the surface is either translucent or transparent, thus the second image projects through while the first remains on the table surface itself. If you're standing directly over it, you're in a perfect spot to see it and nothing gets blocked.
The cool thing about not doing it in software is that you can have the extra layer be a piece of translucent plastic on top of the surface... or you can hold it a few feet up. The second projector can then focus on where you're holding it to project a sharp image. If you do this in software, you'll end up holding a blank, unlit object while the second image is superimposed on the surface, obscuring the main image and negating the benefits of a third dimension. Because of the alternating frames and the second projector, you see an unimpeded original image on the surface and an unimpeded second image on the object you're holding.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
In this particular instance.. it's called a maid.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.