The recent announce­ment of Microsoft’s new prod­uct Sur­face has got me think­ing about touch screen inno­va­tions and the direc­tion that com­put­ing is going in gen­eral. What is the best approach to the tech­nol­ogy, and where will it actu­ally be used in real life? This stuff is very cool, and I’m def­i­nitely excited about it.

First off, check out the three videos on Microsoft’s web­site for Surface.

• Microsoft Sur­face

You can read a little bit more about it on Read/WriteWeb:

• Microsoft Sur­face Hits The Ground Run­ning

As usual, the mar­ket­ing videos for Sur­face are pretty goofy. Some of the things shown are really cool, like the photos, inte­gra­tion with dig­i­tal cam­eras, and paying tabs with credit cards. I can def­i­nitely see this type of thing at yuppie bar.

Some of the other things in the video though are just plain silly. Why on earth would I want a table that when I put my cell phone on it, all it’s fea­tures and price tag pop out? Or a table that asks me if I’m thirsty when I put a drink on it. Obvi­ously, I just bought a drink. We’ll put these nit-​picky details aside for a moment.

As many people have already pointed out, Microsoft’s Sur­face looks very sim­i­lar to Jeff Han’s Multi-​touch tech­nol­ogy (no, they’re not related). Check out these two videos on multi-​touch:

• Per­cep­tive Pixel
• Jeff Han: Unveil­ing the genius of multi-​touch inter­face design

Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t really know very much about the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy of Han’s multi-​touch inter­face. How­ever, Ars Tech­nica has posted an arti­cle about the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy of Microsoft’s Surface:

• What lurks below Microsoft’s Sur­face? A brief Q&A with Microsoft

I found this really inter­est­ing. First of all, Sur­face isn’t really even a touch screen technology.

Sur­face fea­tures a touch inter­face, but it doesn’t use a touch screen. Instead, five sep­a­rate cam­eras are used to record motion on the table’s sur­face. […] In order to get the table as low as it is, five cam­eras are used so that each one can have a small field of view. That trans­lates into better res­o­lu­tion and speed (mea­sured in pixels/second) than a single camera with an excep­tion­ally wide-​angle view of the table surface.

This seems to me to be a strange approach to the prob­lem of cre­at­ing a touch-​sensitive device. Judg­ing from the videos, it just seems like Han’s tech­nol­ogy is much more intu­itive and sen­si­tive. I mean, is it just me, or is that guy with the map in the “The Pos­si­bil­i­ties” Sur­face video making really delib­er­ate move­ments? All the people in the multi-​touch videos seem to just be making these nat­ural and effort­less gestures.

One thing that does really impress me about Sur­face is the hard­ware that’s actu­ally run­ning the show. Accord­ing to Ars Tech­nica, it’s actu­ally just some pretty stan­dard consumer-​level hardware:

Sur­face cur­rently runs on a high-​end PC but uses mainly con­ven­tional com­po­nents. It’s pow­ered by a Core 2 Duo chip and a “newish video card,” and the system runs on 2GB of RAM.

Those cam­eras must be really expen­sive, because for now it looks like one of those Sur­face tables will cost from $5,000-$10,000.

To me, Han’s ideas are more inter­est­ing (from what little I’ve seen of both prod­ucts). It really feels like he’s think­ing about how humans can and should inter­act with com­put­ers. He wants us to no longer be con­fined by cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions that we’ve become accus­tomed to (key­boards for instance).

Sur­face, on the other hand, comes off as much more gad­getry than any­thing else. For sure, the tech­nol­ogy is inter­est­ing and there are some great ideas there. Unfor­tu­nately, a lot of it just seems like a nov­elty, that will quickly wear off. I’m already seeing float­ing adver­tise­ments on that bar table:

I see you’ve ordered a Dark and Stormy. Per­haps you’d like a snack to go with that? (A pic­ture of a deli­cious look­ing choco­late cake floats across the table). Only $8.99…

Update

Here are some more links about Sur­face. Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics has a good write up about the tech­nol­ogy behind Surface:

• Microsoft Sur­face: Behind-​the-​Scenes First Look (with Video)

Seatle PI also has a decent article:

• Microsoft Sur­face brings com­put­ing to the table

Lastly, there is quite a dif­fer­ent take on Sur­face vs. Han’s multi-​touch over on Cre­ativeUI. It’s worth reading:

• Microsoft Sur­face: The future may be closer than we think…