by Pete Wright
I remember the first time I saw this technology demonstrated. It was Jeff Han’s talk at TED a few years back. You should be able to find it in iTunes here.
He was mostly doodling, dragging his fingers around this large display surface, interacting with it in a way I’d never seen. When Apple introduced the same multi-touch surface on the iPhone to be released in June, it was a sign that the technlology had moved out of the lab far faster than anyone expected.
And then, tonight, Microsoft trumped them. I just finished watching the three promotional videos for their new Surface Computing initiative. For the first time in a long, long time, it would appear that Microsoft has a vision.
It also appears that Microsoft is betting on a significantly long adoption curve. The videos all indicate some perverse future tense that even Microsoft doesn’t seeem interested in predicting. Their initial launch should have these tables hitting the commercial market in the $10,000 per unit range, which means I won’t be in a position to drop one in my living room for the better part of a decade.
But to be sure, the credit card processing piece was a wow — truly use of technology I’ve never seen in action.
The challenge with this initiative, particularly in comparison with Apple (since they’re the only other company on the market that offers it right now) is that in Apple’s case, they’re building something that people can use. In less than a month, there will be a product on the market, in peoples’ hands, using multi-touch to wow their friends doing — I might add — many of the same things on dispaly in Microsoft’s tables. Would it have been too much more of a stretch to slap the technology in a table for LG? Samsung? Apple?
Thus, the Surfact Computing Initiative, while certainly more interesting than their UMPC initiative, is relegated for now to ultra-cool PR gimmick. The long-term impact of this technology — and no doubt, the patents they’ve acquired in the process — will be vast. But until I can buy one, it’s as good as vapor.
As usual, Scoble has had some solid hand’s on with this thing and has some interesting points, not the least of which is that this has been in development at Microsoft for over five years.
