Microsoft Surface 2 is real and it looks amazing | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Surface 2 is real and it looks amazing

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40 pointssolipsist18 comments

The future is here. It's a big-ass table.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY

VentureBeat has a video of the presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36rm5yS4c4

The coolest part was when he held up the flyer to the screen. The possibilities!

For a presentation on product that looks as incredible as this, the transition of the presentation on to Ballmer was slightly awkward.

That's exactly what I thought. If Steve Jobs had been presenting he would have been constantly interrupted with applause. Instead, a botched presentation on a very cool product.

But are Apple fans just more vocal, is Ballmer not as good on stage, or are Microsoft's products less interesting?

Or all of the above? Just asking...

To me, it appears to be more than just Jobs vs Ballmer (though that would be a hands-down victory for Jobs, no doubt).

The product was fascinating; it is well worthy of thunderous applause instead of the smattering of claps it received. The way the presentation ended: "I got 10, you got 10!" was pretty cringe-worthy, if you ask me.

Here's my first shot at a theory of how Pixel Sense might work

There is an IR LED backlight as well as the regular white backlight. They have an additional per-pixel LCD shutter that blocks IR. The display repeatedly displays sweeping horizontal and vertical patterns on the IR blocking shutters. At the edges of the display there are a series of IR light detectors. When an object is placed on the display, some IR light will bounce off the object and be internally reflected in the plane of the panel glass. The light is received by the detectors.

What think ye?

Microsoft paid for the company I work for to show off the first Surface at a consumer event last year, and from our experience they seemed pretty indifferent.

There were microsoft staff on our stand to promote it, but they really couldn't be assed, instead spending their time around other Microsoft products that were much more consumer friendly.

We thought it was a pretty cool device, but visitors to the show seemed to side with the MS staff, mostly showing indifference to what appeared much like a glass table.

Surface is a cool technology but it seems very cumbersome and obsolete compared to capacitive multi-touch screens and things like kinect. It's form-factor relegates it to only a niche of the potential market for touch-only UI computing. And that I think will ultimately doom it. Market forces alone make it more likely that Surface's niche will ultimately be filled by perhaps oversized Android or iOS tablets than by Surface itself.

RE: "seems very cumbersome and obsolete compared to capacitive multi-touch screens"

There are fundamental advantages that the surface technology has, but obtaining them (currently) requires the fundamental form factor disadvantage. These would probably balance out, but Microsoft has failed to capitalize on the advantages properly.

The advantages stem from the infrared camera hardware.

Advantage #1: Multi-user, not just multi-touch. You can see the direction that hands are coming from, even when they aren't touching the table. This lets clever software identify people, so that you could have UI pop up to face that person. Different people can do different things with multiple focal points and varying UI orientations.

Advantage #2: Identification of non-capacitive objects. For example, imagine a car customization app. The idea being that you'd sit with a salesperson and work through options together. Place a key on the table and a 3D model of the car that matched that key would drive onto the scene and then park next to the key.

Hopefully someone can figure out a form factor and price point that can capitalize on these advantages.

lol. Does this mean my Surface projects are relevant again?

https://github.com/indexzero/surface-raw-input

used to work at MS and shared a building with the Surface team. Those people were doing some REALLY amazing shit but I don't think it ever saw "the light of day" (read: beyond demos) because the device was so damned expensive.

I did hear that a bunch of places in Vegas have active back orders, though...

I think it has the potential to revolutionize drawing and resemble the traditional drawing table. Can be very comfortable and efficient for anyone designing physical objects (civil engineers, architects, industrial designers). There are already graphic tablets, of course, but they are very expensive and very specialized. This makes me hope that my current way of working staring directly at the screen while moving the mouse might change in a few years.

It might have that potential but I think illustrators and architects will be the last people to adopt it. If you've ever used the last version you would see it was slow, imprecise, buggy, and gave you the feel that you were only vaguely connected to the display. There will always be artists on the leading edge of technology doing cool things, but for people who have jobs to get done, this is one to wait on.

There is a restaurant here in Tokyo where each table is a surface. It took us forever to order because we couldn't manipulate the menus. Our server had to leave the table while taking orders to reboot it. It interpreted input as chorded input because something or someone else was on the table turning pan operations into zoom operations. Quite funny, not practical.

There are already tablet/monitor hybrids (and I mean digitizer tablets with pressure sensitive pens) that don't suffer from the imprecision and accidental input of this and I think they are somewhat popular with artists. A Microsoft Surface, even an order of magnitude better than the last version isn't going to cut it.

It's really cool for sure, but you know what this one man once said "Real artists ship!" Too bad Microsoft didn't put this in a tablet eons ago.

Not sure why you are getting up-votes for this. It isn't adding anything to the conversation other than obvious Microsoft bashing.

The Pixel Sense technology is obviously quite new, so I'm not sure how they were supposed to put it in anything eons ago.

As far as Microsoft not shipping... Well they ship more stuff than a lot of people. True that their tablet and phone offerings are not as good as the competition (yet), but that isn't through not shipping, it's through creating products that was out of touch with consumer expectations.

In the phone world, over the lifetime of the window Mobile, they've probably been quite successful. In tablets, less so, but still they have shipped numerous times over the past decade.

Just saying.

Microsoft didn't capitalize on Touch-based computing (a la Surface - didn't imply about pixel sense at all) when they had the chance before.

Microsoft labs has a lot of crazy cool stuff, but they don't see daylight in the hands of the consumer. There's something to be said about that.

The point is that they missed the boat, but shipped late.

"Gates's admission that he looked at the iPhone, unveiled three years ago in January 2007 and which went on sale in June that year, and thought that "Microsoft didn't aim high enough" is a startling revelation from the man who drove the company to focus on mobile." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-bill-g... - that says it all!

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