A Table. From Microsoft. Seriously.

Back at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January, Microsoft held a demo for some technology journalists, including me, that was so secretive that it wouldn't tell us where the event was, let alone what it was about. Today, it's announcing the product it showed us back then. It's called Microsoft Surface. And it's...an incredibly high-tech table?

Yes, indeed. Surface is a table--which, in this initial version, is an expensive enough proposition that it's for public-place use, not the home--whose top is not just touch-sensitive, but able to sense multiple fingers from multiple people all at once. It can also can identify real-world objects placed upon it. It accomplishes this via use of a Vista PC, a short-throw DLP projector, and cameras aimed at the tabletop, all of which sit inside the table's base. And while nothing else like it is available commercially, folks who see or hear about it seem to come back to the same points of reference--namely the loating-in-the-air interface employed by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report, the iPhone, and those cocktail-table versions of arcade games such as Pac-Man that were popular 25 years ago. (That's gotta be the last time that anyone tried to meld tables and tech.)

My colleague Melissa Perenson reports on the announcement here. And we've posted a slideshow with some images of the table. So I'll just chime in with a few thoughts. (Melissa and I got a bit of hands-on time with Surface last week, incidentally.)

First of all, I can't imagine anyone trying Surface and not being intrigued, at least--or even enchanted--with the possibilities of the basic idea here. By far the niftiest demo Microsoft showed us was one that involved using the table to look at photographs. With Surface's multi-touch interface, several people can sit around the table, using their fingers to rifle through snapshots, rotate them, and blow them up or shrink them at will.

In the controlled environment of the demo, at least, this worked fabulously well, and was way more communal and entertaining than crouching around a garden-variety PC to share photos. When Surface-type technology gets reasonably cheap--or I get unexpectedly wealthy--I could see wanting many of the surfaces in my home, from my coffee table to kitchen counter, to work this way.

Right now, however, Surface is an expensive enough proposition that Microsoft is rolling it out in partnership with various companies that'll use it in public places. And the applications that Microsoft showed us were well, pretty darn mundane. T-Mobile stores will use Surface to help sell phones; Starwood hotels will put it in lobby areas. And Microsoft is working with Harrah's casinos and slot-machine kingpin IGT to use Surface for gambling applications, a disappointingly cheesy way for such a cool technology to make its debut.

The bottom line: It's easy to be excited about Surface's possibilities, and--at least if you're me--much harder to muster enthusiasm for how it's being rolled out.

(By the way, I stay in Starwood properties that have vastly simpler kiosks which seem to be out of order as often as they're in working condition; that made me wonder whether Surface is likely to blue-screen or otherwise break down when subjected to real-world operation. I asked the Microsoft execs we met with about this, and they said it's designed for robust performance, and can alert staffers if there's a problem that needs attention.)

On the same day that Microsoft showed tech journalists Surface at CES, Steve Jobs gave his Macworld Expo keynote at which he unveiled the iPhone. It'd be silly to say the two products are too similar, since Surface is focusing on communal experiences, retail, and gaming, and the iPhone is...well, a phone. But the multi-touch interface and other aspects of the UI are remarkably similar; Microsoft's table really does look sort of like a giant iPhone. (In particular, the iPhone photo applet looks uncannily like a teeny-tiny version of the photo demo Microsoft showed us.) Apple's unquestionably going to steal some of Microsoft's thunder through the simple act of shipping some similar technology in a product that ordinary folk can buy. (That is, if they're willing to pay $500 and sign a two-year contract for a non-3G phone.)

Microsoft says, however, that its long-term plan is to bring the technologies in Surface to the home. And I'm cautiously optimistic that the company will be able to do that, if it's willing to show some patience. There may be a lot of technology inside Surface, but there's nothing that's inherently unimaginably complex or pricey--especially since the heart of the thing is a Vista PC whose specs are similar to those of a powerful off-the-shelf desktop.

Microsoft's track record for figuring out what the next big thing will be is spotty. (If the company was always right, most of us would be carrying Tablet PCs by now.) But having spent a bit of time with Surface, I'm convinced that there's something there.

Okay, how about some video? Microsoft has been secretive about Surface, and is hyping it as a uniquely Redmondian breakthrough. But the world has known that Microsoft Research was working on some of the technologies in it for awhile now, and Microsoft hasn't been the only orgsnization working on this basic idea.

Here's a Microsoft demo of "TouchLight," a research project that incorporates some of the same tech as Surface, but is even more Minority Reportish, since it involves a transparent, vertical display:

And here's New York University's Jeff Han demonstrating a project that's a close cousin of Surface at last year's TED conference. (Han has founded a company called Perceptive Pixel to commercialize his work, so Surface will apparently have some competition.)

And finally--if you've read this far--a quick poll...