Microsoft Surface
 

I saw this on digg.com!

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Very cool.

Yeah. I just saw it on the Drudge report. It's pretty cool I must admit. Our technology is getting closer to what sci fi movies have, with the touch screens and all.

thats rather cool !

I saw it on slashdot this morning. Very impressive technology.

Very cool, but I'm sure the price tag will make you wanna cry.

macrumors.com claims its aimed toward commercial use and the price range is $5,000 to $10,000.

Hmm. Yes, they bought that idea a few years ago. There's nothing very bleeding edge about touch screen technology - bear in mind that it didn't catch on last time around because it's actually quite clumsy and awkward compared to linguistic interaction and even - gasp - pointing devices.

There's an article about this on the register ( http://www.theregister.co.uk ) with some comments that mention the roots of this technology. Microsoft's pulling a fast one as per, making it look like they're innovators. No real surprise there from the company that didn't write Microsoft Internet Explorer. Or Microsoft SQL Server. Or Microsoft DOS, come to think of it.

In fact, while I'm at it, here's the link to the article itself:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05...ace_computing/

If you want the really cool version of a multitouch system you can check out Perceptive Pixel. Its advantage is the display is like a flat panel so you don't need any large space behind it (With Surface you need space for the cameras). It also allows for much bigger displays as you see in there demo. The only drawback is that you can't use Microsoft's one byte "bar codes". The final advantage is its not CPU intensive at all, Surface requires constant vision processing on the 5 infrared cameras to work, this display is just like any other input device.

This was made public a year ago with a cool video and this awesome conference demo.

What has Microsoft developed itself? MS BASIC?