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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

I saw the prototype in Redmond over a decade ago, back then it was in the form of a coffee table -- very impressive at the time, but no clear business strategy.

In technology terms, this is a glacial age! I find it amazing they were able to persist and refine the technology into a successful product. Kudos!

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Not everything branded "Surface" is "the big-ass table". Microsoft has been in this space for a long, long time. Ink recognition, remote video sharing, presentation are all products that have been in the pipeline in some way or other for a very long time.

I'm pretty sure these came out of the Perceptive Pixel acquisition back in 2012. Microsoft bought a company built giant monitors with powerful touch capabilities. Not the most high profile of acquisitions, but it definitely set them off in this direction.

Doesn't look to me like it's very related to the PixelSense.

Careful, Surface is now a brand of various computers, PixelSense was the old Surface Table with a display where pixels included cameras, but is now used to describe the new Surface's screen. So let's summarize:

* old Surface: a table.

* new Surface: a brand that started out with tablets but now includes a convertible laptop, a desktop, and a conference room computer.

* old PixelSense: a renamed old Surface with new fancy (very cool) display technology that includes optical sensing pixels, but seems defunct ATM.

* new PixelSense: the screen of a new Surface (high resolution, capacitive touch, stylus).

(disclaimer: used to work for Microsoft but with no inside knowledge)

PixelSense is a company that Microsoft acquired a couple years ago. It's unrelated to the original "surface" technology they showcased previously (the big coffee table you are talking about), other than sharing the same name. Surface is now just the branding of their whole series of first party touch enabled devices (surface pro, surface studio, surface book, surface hub)

I think you are referring to Perceptive Pixel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptive_Pixel

That was the case a few years ago, but it is no longer the case now. See:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...

And compare to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

Two totally different things.

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