A New Kind of Flat Screen: Microsoft's Surface

This is one of those times that I don't mind admitting I was wrong. Despite my ho-humming yesterday, the "top-secret new product" that was announced at midnight is actually pretty darned cool. As Melissa Perenson reported last night, Microsoft Surface is a special screen with "multi-touch" capabilities -- that is, multiple points on the screen can respond to physical user contact simultaneously.

The immediate comparison is to a scene in Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise's character moved images and information around in much the same way as we do today -- except on a stylish, semi-transparent vertical screen, and using his hands instead of a mouse. The technology is currently licensed to four partners, including Starwood Hotels (where it will be used in common areas for information services) and T-Mobile (for in-store comparison shopping). If you check out PC World's photo gallery, you'll see a tabletop Microsoft Surface unit being used to sort photos and music, zoom in on images, search maps, and draw pictures.

By now this should be sounding familiar to regular Digital World readers -- I reported on something quite similar last August: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories' (MERL) DiamondTouch Table, which I saw and played with at last year's SIGGRAPH conference. And by "quite similar" I mean "conceptually and functionally identical" -- except that the DiamondTouch Table requires that each user sit on a special chair or stand on a specific spot, so that the built-in receiver can transmit a signal that the screen's tiny antennas can pick up. Microsoft's system uses overlapping cameras to detect movement.

An important note for Microsoft bashers and boosters: I'm in no way suggesting that Microsoft or Mitsubishi stole this idea from each other. Nor am I suggesting that one is superior to the other. When MERL demoed the DiamondTouch Table at SIGGRAPH, it was on a wide 42'' screen with a resolution of 2736 x 2048; Microsoft's demo was on a 30'' DLP screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio at 1024 x 768. MERL's technology also allows the system to distinguish between different users touching the screen, something Microsoft's system doesn't do. But Surface also has infrared capabilities, allowing for more kinds of interaction. And, perhaps most important, without having to worry about special receiver chairs or surfaces, Surface's use is much more instinctive -- and since it will be deployed in places where ordinary people are more likely to use it, Surface may well "change the way people interact with technology." It's rare that I say this about Microsoft products, but my hat's off to the Surface developers for living up to the hype.