Microsoft has taken the wraps off a coffee-table computer, “Surface,” that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.
The machines, which Microsoft debuted on Wednesday at a technology conference in California, USA, are set to arrive in November in select stores, hotels and resorts.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen.
Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.
Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time.
In a demonstration, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group’s marketing director, “dipped” his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 – that’s approximately around Rs 2,00,000 to Rs 4,00,000 – per unit, the company isn’t immediately aiming for the finger painting set. It expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.
Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cell phones at mobile stores in the US. When customers plop a phone down on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset.
Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.
Guests sitting in hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards card tagged with a bar code.
Customers will also be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items “onto” the card.
Historically, Microsoft has always focused on creating software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. Some recent exceptions, however, include the Xbox 360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that developed Surface.
For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.
Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.
Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface. Digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen.
Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images.
“It’s not a touch screen, it’s a grab screen,” Bolger said.
YOU CAN TOUCH THIS...
• Direct interaction: Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands, interacting with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
• Multi-touch: Surface computing recognises many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger like a typical touch-screen, but up to dozens of items at once.
• Multi-user: The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
• Object recognition: Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.
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