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Microsoft's Touchy-Feely TableIs surface computing the next big thing?

By Harry McCracken
Posted Monday, June 4, 2007, at 4:24 PM ET
Microsoft's Surface. Click image to expand.

When I first saw Microsoft's new, top-secret project, it was shrouded under a black cloth. Execs from Redmond told us that this mystery product would change computing forever. Then they whisked away the drapery with a meaningful flourish to reveal ... a freakin' table?

My initial dumbfounded skepticism faded as I saw what that piece of furniture could do. It doesn't just have a touch-sensitive screen on its surface; it's designed to be used by several people at once, with multiple fingers or even both hands. It can also identify objects that are placed upon it and interact with them. Nobody who'd seen Minority Report could overlook the similarities to Tom Cruise's crime-busting computer, an interface that let him manipulate data with a wave of his hand.

At the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer formally introduced the table, now dubbed Microsoft Surface. Ballmer described the table as "a totally new way of interacting with and experiencing technology." He's right, although that's no guarantee it will catch on. Today's most-advanced personal computers still use the old-school mouse (invented by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s) and QWERTY keyboard (a layout invented by Christopher Sholes in the mid-1800s). Pretty much every attempt to supplant or supplement these venerable devices has gone absolutely nowhere. Still, I'm convinced that the surface-computing interface is a keeper.

Surface computing's greatest potential lies in inherently social activities like photo sharing. While intuitive might be the most-abused word in user-interface design, it describes Surface's photo-album application perfectly. Several people can use the app at once to rummage through separate piles of photos, each one correctly oriented for which side of the table they're sitting at. You can do things you'd do with a real-world snapshot, like grab it by its corner, swivel it around, and slide it over to someone sitting across from you. But you can also tap a picture's corners, then sweep your arms back and forth to enlarge or shrink it. Or you can snap a shot with a Wi-Fi-enabled camera, then plop the camera on the table and watch the picture tumble onto the screen. The overall effect is enchanting—not something I'm used to saying about any technology product, let alone one from Microsoft. (This video from Popular Mechanics reveals many of Surface's neatest tricks.)

How's the technology work? Hidden inside Surface's base is a computer—this is a Microsoft table, so it's running Windows Vista—that uses a DLP projector to shine its display onto the table's 30-inch screen. Five video cameras are aimed at the tabletop; some very fancy image-processing software analyzes their input to track fingertips and other items as they rest on and move around the table. Objects such as the digital camera used in the photo application need to have dominolike dot codes affixed to their undersides for Surface to identify them; data transfer with other devices can happen via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. (Dot code aside, Microsoft says that the camera is a stock model you can buy today.)

Microsoft hasn't come up with something unprecedented here. Research on "multitouch" interfaces has been going on since at least the early 1980s. HP, Mitsubishi, and Philips have demonstrated similar concept devices. New York University scientist Jeff Han, who wowed attendees at the 2006 and 2007 TED conferences with his Surface-like demo, has formed a company to commercialize his version of the concept. Still, Microsoft will apparently be the first company to get these ideas out of the lab and into a product that's for sale.

Er, that is except for one gizmo that looks like a Lilliputian version of Surface's tabletop: the iPhone. "We have invented a new technology called multitouch," declared Steve Jobs back in January, demonstrating it by using his fingertips to zip through music and photos on the phone. Researchers who worked on multitouch 25 years ago might take exception to Jobs' assertion that the concept is Apple's. But the fact that the company will scoop Microsoft when the iPhone ships on June 29 is proof yet again that the product-introduction gods smile on Jobs like no one else.

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Harry McCracken is editor in chief of PC World.
Photograph of Microsoft's Surface by Andrei Pungovschi/AP Photo.
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Remarks from the Fray:

No one has ever said they thought the keyboard and monitor was a great way to work with the computer.

20 years ago I was at conferences where impish GUI iconoclasts (pardon the expression) from PARC were advocating hyperbolic displays, motion sensing responsive screen surfaces, etc. The history of interface novelty at SIGGRAPH began with the first conference. MIT had 3-d surround, gesture sensing displays in the 80s.

Wired musicians like Tina Blaine http://www.jamodrum.net/ have built spatial interfaces to midi controllers that whole audiences could play with at once, like beach balls with pressure sensors that used rf connections to synths...churning out interactive music with unique and creative interfaces.

Nintendo commercialized a vr glove, for Engelbart's sake.

But none of the solutions have been, as they say, "sticky." Nothing comes close to the universality of the keyboard and the mouse.

And nothing will anytime soon.

The short reason is simply that every non-keyboard interface requires learning as much novel muscle/nerve coordination as it takes to learn to type. If you learn to type, you can type on a million keyboards. If you learn the multi touch interface of the apple iphone, however, you only can redial your grocery delivery service on your iphone. If you have to borrow a friends Blackberry, you are in an entirely different, multidimensional haptic universe. That requires typing.

Its one thing to create the intricate, robust and efficient mapping of intent to gesture to result that a satisfying interface design requires. Its another problem altogether to get the 100th monkey to learn it. Or even the second one.

Maybe Apple or Microsoft can impose a standard by brute force. Apple sort of succeeded in nudging Microsoft, and thence the globe, into the WIMP standard created at PARC in the 70s. But Microsoft intentionally scrambled some of Englebart, and Brenda Laurel's original brilliant clarity, for product differentiation. In so doing, they dumbed down the beauty of the original interface concept.

Making an interface intentionally inconsistent, as you can find in any version of Word, for example, is like introducing diseases into DNA. You can't replicate and generalize from success. Every encounter with a new task requires rote memory. These issues are simple, and at root, political, not technological.

Its like the 19th century Spanish generals who convinced the Parliament to require all railroads in Spain to run on a different guage track than the French, to make it harder to be invaded.

So, Surface makes great Utube video. A lot of other cool combinations of projection and touch sensitivity do too. But until Ebay puts out a Surface application that allows you to stack and sort your collector Barbies and Speak and Spells with haptic versimilitude, the Surface is just going to be one more fancy place to set your Metropolitan vodkatini while you size up the hot singles in the lobby.

--zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

My brother-in-law is so interested in this kind of technology, he has become a low-level evangelist for it, showing captive audiences the Jeff Han video and the like. But what stake does someone like him really have in this kind of interface? He's not a graphic designer or someone who works in the visual arts. Why are we suddenly so anxious to get away from our keyboards?

I understand Steve Jobs' point of view that the keyboard we have hooked up to our devices is a one-size-fits-all peripheral. As a result, the keyboard does have a number of limitations. It can't highlight and/or enlarge the important keys used by particular applications and it can't disappear when you don't need your keyboard but do need extra space.

But it seems like I would really miss what we would lose if we were to ditch our keyboards, what with their whole location in space and time "feature." For one, there's a continuity to using a single keyboard to do all the work a computer or a device does. But even more than that, I feel like we would become just slightly more passive if robbed of our QWERTYs: we would be selecting icons, pointing to items in pull-down menus, etc., instead of typing what we want into the system. With my keyboard I can be creative. With my mouse, I can only grab the cheese they place in front of me.

--armchairperson

(To reply, click here.)

(6/5)

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