I closed out this week speaking with Nigel Keam, Architect, and Mark Bolger, Director of Marketing for Microsoft Surface. Both are very proud of their product and have every reason to be.
Microsoft Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor designed to bring friends and family together through the sharing of technology. Users can share photos, play games and complete everyday tasks by using hand gestures, touch or other physical objects with Microsoft Surface. This new custom software platform runs atop Windows Vista and is a good way to highlight the flexibility of the new OS in conjunction with new hardware and applications designed specifically for Windows Vista. Although it’s maybe hard to imagine all that Surface will be able to do in the future, I have to say that today, even in its infancy, it’s astonishing!
It all started with the idea of blending the physical and the virtual worlds through technology, because although technology might bring us closer together in some ways, it can isolate us in others. Family members often use computers in separate rooms and email or instant message each other to communicate (how many of you can relate?). One main goal of Surface is to bring people together at a point where the technology can be shared amongst users of a single unit — for example, allowing family members to interact with each other face-to-face instead of in isolation.
Surface is the brainchild of Stevie Bathiche from the Microsoft Hardware Group and Andy Wilson from MS Research. The first prototype was built in 2003 and it subsequently took four years to complete a working model, business plan and the other steps necessary to get a product ready to go to market. In May of this year, Microsoft Surface was announced at Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in San Diego.
But what’s it really all about?
Think of Surface as being similar to a rear-projection TV on steroids, the difference being that you can interact with it by touch rather than with a remote. Surface uses DLP lighting and 5 cameras that are locked in place. Infrared sensors within Surface track movements, letting you do things like draw directly on the screen using your finger, a brush or other techniques. All Surface applications are written in managed code and most use WPF or XMA; Flash was used in early development, but was replaced before launch.
Surprisingly, there aren’t 3 or 4 discrete computers sitting underneath the tabletop: Microsoft Surface runs on a standard Core2Duo processor with only 2GB of RAM. Earlier prototypes executed image processing from the CPU, but with the advent of graphics processing off-loading enabled by Windows Vista, the GPU now uses DirectX 9 and C# for real-time image processing. This does require a higher-end graphics card, as anyone running Windows Vista probably knows.
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We don’t wanna say we told you so, but, ya know, we did. On Monday, Microsoft filed a mystery application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. Sounds like a VoiP device, right?
“Quattro,” a k a Windows Home Server, has been a puzzle to me, in terms of its codename. It didn’t seem to fit with the other members of the Windows Server family: Longhorn Server, Cougar, Centro, etc.
