Future Microsoft tablet to be 'no thicker than sheet of glass'
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
Also, it seems like they're pretty far behind the times on this. Three years is a long time, and it seems likely that the industry will change significantly before then. Apple or HTC could easily come out with a similar device before MS hits the market.
They should take a queue from Apple and have small teams or individuals working on a 10-3-1 process - make 10 different prototypes where everyone can go wild, the 3 best of those are further developed, then a final polished iteration from those.
The person being interviewed is not a product developer. He is a computer scientist who did pioneering research in touch interfaces going back the to '70s.
Sure, but that is if they see it as viable. Unless it's just an add-on secondary input device and display, it'll require that the OS and apps all work really well with it. So there's the big issue... would it work great with existing software or require a fresh start? Can it work well for mainstream use including things like word processing?
The work doesn't seem particularly new. If one looks closely at the first picture "Bill Buxton using the Active Desk he helped develop at the University of Toronto" we can see the older Apple color icon at the top left.
Of course it still is a very cool technology to respect and admire even if existing OSes aren't quite ready for it. The biggest problem I see with touch interfaces on legacy OSes is that they can work better on large screens, but don't scale down well.
(Sent from a real iPad)
My bet is that we will see an Apple surface before a Microsoft one.
It'll have a fridge hum detector to make sure you don't try and use it in the kitchen ...
http://counternotions.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/concept-produ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0#t=2m9s
The problem I see with putting sensors in the pixels is that you're going to need to light that pixel up to use the sensor. How do you sense touch or image in a black section of the screen?
So five sensors, really.
Not holding my breath on this one. Not even taking a deeper breath than normal.
The researcher seems most interested in the bits about the fourth "capture" pixel built into the LCD-something much harder to DIY. The possibilities of this tech would be very wide ranging-much more so than a big table with projectors and cameras in it (surface).
Cite?
Reactable has been around for a while: http://www.reactable.com/ (if nothing else, the first page of results found youtube vids from 2006)
There's this one, plus many more, from Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Interactive-Multitouch-Displ... Many of the projects there come in well below $500 for absolutely everything, and there are a few software libraries for detecting multitouch built specifically for devices like these (reflected IR light) because the technique is so cheap and simple.
(sorry)