Microsoft Surface Hub | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Surface Hub

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215 pointsSanderMak117 comments

We were just talking about the need for "better whiteboards that aren't SmartBoards(TM)" at work. Whiteboards can be incredible collaboration tools, but capturing that back out to the team can be tough. Coincidentally, we've also started giving out Surface Pro's as work computers and to the person they absolutely love them.

As always, software will be the problem, so if the software is well thought out this could be awesome.

edit thanks for the downvote?

what did you disagree with?

I agree about software - one cool thing is that there are a number of apps where the traditional PC or tablet is actually a sub-optimal user experience and they've focused on them - for instance, Stormboard is in their demo, and it works OK on PC, but would be a lot better on something like this.

Yeah absolutely. For a while it was a struggle to get whiteboards where I work. Our facilities manager wondered what the trouble was since all our machines could connect to the projectors that were in every room and we could just show slides.

Turns out they had fundamentally misunderstood the mode of communication that whiteboards enable and how it's different than slides.

Similar for scratch paper. Whiteboard is just a collaborative version, but in both cases you are working out incomplete ideas to arrive at a sketch of a plan. It is only necessary to capture the final plan.

<rant> On that note, here's a rant about iPad used for scratch paper:

I sometimes try to use an iPad for scratch paper but it doesn't really work out the way I want. Requirements: - Scratch paper doesn't need to persist very long, just while I'm still in the middle of working it out. - The final result needs to last until I'm done taking the actions it describes. - It needs to be easy to find the scratch papers for projects I'm currently working on. They need to still be editable in that case too.

What I get instead is: - "Notes" organization with multiple pages in a notebook and folders, but the interface to organize and navigate between these isn't very good. I often don't bother to organize because of that. It also makes it hard to remember which notebook has the thing I want. - Pencil and paper is still better than finger or passive stylus due to palm detection, line width, accuracy, and the need to zoom and scroll due to those problems. An active stylus can help but I don't currently own one. - Too many choices of software, so I stick with the one I have now instead of buying them all to try them all. None of them sound like what I want from their descriptions. - On active styluses, same problem. Too expensive to buy them all and try them. Reviews focus on the wrong things. It is either talking about writing words for a note, in which case the reviews usually say it doesn't matter what features the stylus has, or it is about art. I want to draw simple sketches of flowcharts, UI, etc. which is kinda like drawing art but not so picky about certain features. - Partly due to organization issues, I tend to not delete old scratch notes from the iPad. Even something email-like with an "Archive" button or moving to a "Read Mail" folder would help. - Most of the software that I've tried does not easily sync with a PC/Mac. It might have an export to PDF / PNG option but that is a one-way export. - I do not want a subscription cloud service for my scratch paper notes. I don't want a subscription cloud service at all, thank you very much.

</rant>

It doesn't answer all of your gripes, but I've gotten tons of mileage out of my Galaxy Note 3 and Papyrus.

Yeah, it organizes things into notes and notebooks, but I usually ignore that and just email myself the notes I've just taken as a PDF for later review...and that seems to work pretty well for most cases...and I get to integrate those notes into the rest of my on-computer organization scheme.

I use onenote on my surface for this, although I've still found myself going back to real notepads, mostly because the battery life is better.

Thinking back to college, a fully-drawn whiteboard is only somewhat useful. What's most important is the presentation - what the person is saying while they draw, the order the drawings are made, and how they connect.

The real value is in the presentation.

When you get a picture of the whiteboard, it doesn't just give you that static info. It helps you remember the presentation the way that a photo of home brings back the smells of home.

But a dozen minutes of meeting that record someone's whiteboard presentation, is a lot to store for later review. How do we automate the pulling of important, informative parts out of a video?

> The real value is in the presentation.

This is true sometimes, but if it's a design discussion and you're whiteboarding how something should be laid out, or even steps of what's completed and what's left, just a snapshot of the final state of the whiteboard is tremendously useful. It prevents the need for another person jotting down everything that was written up on the board.

A time-lapse would be great as well.

So a GIF (or PNG) of the time lapse, as well as a still image of the final frame?

I was thinking of something with a slider so you can find that diagram someone drew in the middle of a discussion last week.

You should see what Imgur has done in merging GIFs and WEBM videos. Every GIF has full video controls, including a slider and a play/pause button.

So basically if we just hosted the timelapse on Imgur...

We've made a board that can achieve the playback. Made a quick demo video of our first prototype. Would love any more ideas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo

Since the data on a whiteboard could be vector based, something like a diffed SVG could work better.

MS already has something like this in OneNote, but I'm not sure how frequent the snapshots are. It's more of a revision history than a "watch every letter be written", IIRC.

seems like the onenote revision history (undo, redo, and version tracking) could be hacked to accomplish something similar.

a video/audio scrubber control that lets you go back and forth.

also another interesting thing about OneNote is that it can record audio, and embed a time index of the audio into everything that is being written,drawn or typed into a notebook. Currently it highlights what was done at that time index of the audio. but it could be used to show the exact state of page at any given time in the recording.

The Audio recording feature has been in onenote since 2003 SP1.

And though it's not the presentation, its an aide de memoir of it (for those present).

Better than one's own jotting, in that the specific lettering and diagram shapes are linked to the presentation (though the cognitive processing involved in one's own jotting is also valuable).

Yeah, I don't disagree.

But I think that this forms just one model for how whiteboards can work.

There's still lots of value in being able to capture the current state of the board and send it out, which is something which frustratingly doesn't yet work as simply as it should.

I've even resorted to having a 'minutes taker' designated in a meeting, who's job it was to capture and annotate useful diagrams and work on the whiteboard and send them out to all the parties there.

Taking Minutes is something that's still hard to delegate to automation. I usually just do this myself when nobody else is taking minutes. Having a meeting without minutes is as bad as erasing the whiteboard immediately after drawing on it.

  I like another comment's suggestion of a time-lapse. 
  * So we'd just need a webcam (or other camera implementation) ($5?)
  * Stick this to the wall opposite the whiteboard? ($5 in tape?)
  * Have a RasPi do the heavy lifting and email? ($35?)
    Or maybe a cloud-backend for the video-to-GIF? (Imgur integration?) ($40?)
  * Wifi setup seems like a solved problem by now. ($10)

I think I just made a product, who wants to help me develop/distribute it? Looks like $60 in hardware costs, who would pay $100 for one of these?

I like the basic idea, but a couple problems i see, Glare on the whiteboard from something like a window, and the board being obstructed by someone writing on it.

Bah, you're selling it in corporate spaces, charge 10x that much!

Bane, We've been working on solving the exact problem you pointed out. We've made a whiteboard which lets you broadcast everything you write with a normal marker to a mobile device. It's not perfect yet but we'll get there soon. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo

Curious, what is it about SmartBoards that you don't like? I've never used one, but I work in the city where their HQ is located and know some people who work there.

They're buggy, gimmicky, overpriced pieces of crap. Or at least the models a few years ago were, they may have gotten better in the meantime.

SMART makes a ton of money in the education market, and we had about a dozen at my high school. The touch controls aren't sensitive or precise enough, the model of projecting onto a separate touchscreen means that it has to be recalibrated constantly, and the only software (SMART's drawing software) that takes advantage of the functionality has almost no features and still manages to have a horrible UI. No teacher used it for more than two or three lessons.

The only time I've ever used them was in an education setting and even then the people who owned them said the smartboards were not worth the hassle.

hmm. Back in my high school days (about 6 years ago), my physics professor had one in his classroom and he used it for every lecture. It was good for him because he could do page after page of whiteboarding and then send us to pdf to review.

Of course this is pretty impressive 6 years ago. If they haven't changed at all since then, I wouldn't use them, I would just project a touchscreen computer and use a stylus.

To be honest, I think the last time I really tried to use one was so long ago I don't even remember what the trouble was. People at my org who've tried to use one more recently all say that they "work better when you're part of a very large all SmartBoard ecosystem" which I take to mean getting things like the right markers and such are easier.

Funny enough, an old predecessor to all this treated the board surface kind of like a large scanner face, when you were ready to "capture" the board, you hit a button and a large arm scanned the board and printed out a black and white copy of the board contents onto a piece of thermal paper. In a few seconds you could print off a copy for everybody in the room. From the age of paper sadly, but definitely simple and useful.

The company I currently work for uses whiteboards, but simply snaps a photo of the whiteboard after a meeting/discussion/etc. and pushes it to some shared location. Works well enough for our purposes.

I have the same opinion of this as I did about the original Microsoft Surface [0]. Basically, it looks like a really cool toy, but is far too expensive to be used in any real situation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BWJvQD3nT4

The devil's in the user experience details.

"Steve, can you pull up the thing?"

"Yeah, I added the thing to the thing but it didn't show up."

"Did you push the button?"

"What button?"

"To put the thing in the thing you've got to push the button."

"Oh, okay. Wait. The thing just disappeared."

"It might have to sync."

"I just got an error."

"Fuck it. Can someone just mirror their laptop screen up here?"

I very much agree. Skype itself is, unfortunately, too much problems sometimes.

I really hope #1 priority in this thing would be its stability.

> "Fuck it. Can someone just mirror their laptop screen up here?"

(Scene repeats.)

I would love to read a study of how many person-hours of productivity are lost annually to people waiting for laptops and projectors to cooperate so that the meetings can begin.

One of the cool things about the 84" version is that it does 4K at 120 Hz. This allows for much lower touch and stylus latency. It is likely using custom internal hardware like the 5K iMac to do achieve that refresh rate so you are probably stuck with the built in GPU.

It is odd that the 55" is only 1080p when you have 55" 4K Vizio TV's going for $999.

Why does 120hz vs 60hz matter fo latency? Or 4k vs 1080p?

Because for the old stuff.. we are talking a 1-2 second lag. 60hz vs 120hz is like 16ms vs 8ms per frame, which is not noticeable.

You'd be surprised how sensitive we are to latency on input. Microsoft themselves did studies on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

You can visibly see and feel the delay on the Wacom Centiqs and they're 60 Hz.

You adjust but it's not as ideal as there's mild tendency to under/over draw. This is probably less of a problem for a whiteboard but for art, its more problematic.

That's probably due to input lag rather than refresh rates though. For non-TN screens, input lag (generally >30 ms) tends to dwarf refresh rate differences (16 ms vs 8 ms).

The 55" 4K has a lot of lag, and so not good for gaming or other high refresh needs... Looks pretty though.

Source: I have one sitting on my desk.

Can you code on it?

Of course! They MUST be up to code, or the whole thing will crash!

> One of the cool things about the 84" version is that it does 4K at 120 Hz. This allows for much lower touch and stylus latency.

Not necessarily. Input lag on IPS (especially the large 4K ones) is generally a much higher contributor to overall delay than refresh rate.

See this (filter the resolution to 4K): http://www.displaylag.com/display-database/

I get why they called it the Surface Hub but I initially assumed that it would be a docking station for a Surface tablet.

Me, too. I love Microsoft but they need to hire someone better to name their products.

They also need to stop slapping the product name "Surface" onto everything.

Why? I think it was pretty clear that the Surface brand is Microsoft's entry into touch-based computing, which this product also heavily utilises. But hey, i'm not the typical obtuse HN reader.

You don't remember Microsoft Surface, the coffee table touch computer?

Yes i do, and i also remember when they didn't release it for the wider market.

I assumed it was an app store for Surface apps.

Their seems to be some link: at 41 second into the video you see a Surface's screen getting update together with the big screen though it's not clear what sort of link it is (i.e. which one is the master)

I think that was onenote which has real time syncing.

I'm excited to use this in the future, mainly because the OneNote integration looks really slick, and OneNote is incredible. If this could get integrated with Outlook (e.g. you accept a meeting and your AD user account is automatically included into the session with any permissions taken care of) that would be superb.

Looks nice, but cost may be a problem. At Google in 2013, there seemed to be one conference or small meeting room for every 7 or 8 people (I am guessing about these numbers, but hopefully close). Their meeting rooms had relatively low cost monitors that ran Google Groups. Shared Google Documents took the place of the collaborative surface on a Hub. I was in Mountain View and my team mates were in NYC so I used these meeting rooms for an hour or two a day. Pretty effective. As another guess, the Hub might increase the cost for each meeting room by $10K.

A cheaper alternative might be really good screen sharing and group drawing access for Microsoft Surfaces. That might even be preferable as far as getting stuff done.

I thought about cost first as well, and I imagine this isn't targeted at people who are picking Google Apps for cost reasons. I figured like most Microsoft products, this is focused on the Enterprise, and they'd be much happier selling 100+ at a discount than one or two to small or medium firms.

A company could adopt them for specific meeting rooms. If you need it, book one of the capable rooms. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

We have these fancy Cisco video conferencing systems in all of our conference rooms with MASSIVE TVs instead of projectors. I imagine they're at least 10k.

The best part? They don't even work. The HDMI inputs never work and we always have to us VGA. The sound doesn't work at all. We brought in $20 Logitech speakers just to play a video.

If the Surface Hub even sort of works it'll be worth it to most big companies.

The idea is interesting but getting the software right will be really hard and without it been effortless everyone will end up sat back down taking notes and it'll become an expensive whiteboard/screen.

This is very true, i'm imagining someone sitting at their surface "ummm wait, its not going up, oh oh my bluetooth was off"... "wait now it's saying I don't have permission to project on this screen" "oh you need to talk to Jim, he'll set you up an account"

and then everyone huddles around the tiny tablet.

I don't think this will be the case, as the Surface Hub supports so many graceful Fallback Options. It even works as a dumb Miracast Receiver, if all else fails.

re/code has a recent review: http://recode.net/2015/04/29/the-new-world-of-whiteboards-fr...

So they bolted the table to a wall?

my thought exactly.

There might be a software component to this.

Yeah exactly everyone at Microsoft is so dumb. Literally all 100000+ people that work there are in the bottom 1% of intelligence worldwide. Probably because they don't use Linux. Everyone knows that just typing ls in bash boosts your IQ by over 9000 points immediately.

Why is this attitude so widespread?

Edit: oh no guys my internet points! Gimme back my internet points!

It's not that I believe Microsoft to be dumb. However the entire page makes it seem like what they've done is somehow incredibly innovative even though it is clearly not.

Why isn't it falling to the ground though?

Unless they used some sort of bolt-like technology to keep it up there...interesting...

They are using a fastenating technology to mount to the wall.

No, the interactive touch-screen tabletop computers that used to be called "Surface" are now "PixelSense".

The Surface table and Surface hub use quite different touch tracking technologies. The table used cameras sitting at the floor level IIRC because touch technology was not that advanced at the time. You cannot bolt that to a wall without it protruding a lot.

This looks quite promising. What piqued my interest was the section that said "Universal apps built for Windows 10 shine on Microsoft Surface Hub and scale to the large screen."

Looking further into Universal Apps for Windows 10 leads to http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/03/02/a-first-loo... which details the vision for the platform. That page mentions: "... Windows 10 will make it easy for you to create a Windows app that packages your website for publishing to the Store. Once installed, your website can update and call Universal APIs from JavaScript, creating a more engaging user experience."

Could someone more familiar with Universal Apps shed more light on this? It sounds interesting, but I'm trying to figure out if this is similar to Chrome Webstore Apps or Hyrbid Mobile Apps wrapped in Web UI's (e.g. Cordova).

A web developer can create a package for a website that is deployed to the store. Each time a user opens this app it's loading the content from your web server - so different from a native / html wrapper. Furthermore your JS on your live site, when the site is run from this app, can do something like: if (Windows) { ...call native APIs... }.

This likely also means you can use iOS objective C or the android API for apps on the display since they are all supported on Win10 now.

This is interesting. With the prevalence of windows in the corporate world, I could see this catching on. The biggest issues I think are going to be: the market share of W7 and under, and cost.

I could also see it do horribly, ala the original Surface Table thing (did they even sell those?)

Ha, I do remember seeing one of those Surface Tables once - it was a couple years ago at a Microsoft facility in Boston.

Personally, I hate touchscreens. I recently went to Logan International in Boston, and discovered that the big boards with flight/gate listings had been replaced with wide-screen TV-sized touch screen interfaces. It took me almost five minutes to get into the touch screen interface, figure out how the search function was supposed to work, realize the search function was broken, and then scroll through the listings to find my flight. In ye olden days, I could have stood there looking at the board, and either seen immediately what my gate was, or waited thirty seconds or so for it to cycle to the second page if there were a lot of flights.

Windows 10 actually does look very good. They've rolled back the blunders of the Win8 UI, which is really the only reason I can see for somebody not upgrading before. There's really no excuse for continuing to use Win7 or god forbid, XP for much longer.

Was your phone dead? I haven't actually looked at one of those arrival/departure boards in close to a decade.

Sometimes analog is just quicker. There's nothing like getting to an area with shit wireless when you're relying on your phone. So I print out tickets, confirmation numbers, even directions and maps when I travel. My last trip I was kicking myself for not remembering a little bubble compass...

I don't clutter my phone with every single airline's app, electronic boarding passes often don't list the gate and never reflect status changes, and I don't get text updates when I'm traveling for work because our corporate booking system helpfully hard-codes my office phone in the contact information.

Besides, even when the stars line up and my phone really does reliably give me updates on the flight status, digging it out of my pocket, unlocking it, etc is more hassle than glancing at a status board as I walk past.

You don't need separate apps. I use this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flightawar...

(Though as I said in another comment, I still check the boards when they're close by, just to be sure.)

Maybe it's irrational, but I don't trust my phone app to have the latest info on gate info or delays.

It's not irrational. The text alerts (from United anyway) are hit and miss. Half the time I find out about delays and cancellations from the board long before the phone get an update.

Indeed. I've even seen several times the multi-airline boards have delay info that the reader board at the gate doesn't even have yet!

"The biggest issues I think are going to be: the market share of W7 and under, and cost."

If they make W10 easily deployable (no friggin cloud sign-on) and it is not a training hassle compared to W8, then I see adoption going up quite nicely.

I wonder what happened with Surface as a "product"... Ever since they used it for their tablet, i thought it would dissappear or receive a different name.

I saw a demo of it several years ago and it was pretty impressive back then, detecting "Red Bull" cans + loading the appropriate app, playing chess, ...

I found a link with some examples iwth it can do: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/pixelsense/applicationpages....

It was cool, but it was big and expensive and unfocused. Who was the target market for it? Microsoft sure as heck didn't know.

They renamed it PixelSense because the name Surface was too good not to apply to a mass market tablet product.

I wonder if this is poised to take on the ubiquitous smartboard found in high schools all across the country. Seems like a better mousetrap in that regard. That being said, I don't know anything about cost of either smartboards or the surface hub.

It is nice that the original Surface lives on.

I really liked their idea back when the Surface was introduced, specially that .NET was the main programming stack.

Now it would be WinRT/.NET, most likely.

My pet project Writelive offers a similar experience today:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.writelive

write / draw on Android tablet & show via web, collaborate in real time & more

http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934 http://write-live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e http://write-live.com/d/7e0ba663-14b7-4ffd-ac9f-b26eb8d47d6e

use mouse / wheel to zoom/pan

Microsoft is just crushing it with their visual design work lately. I have to admit, I'm impressed and re-thinking my opinion on MS.

I've always thought Apple's missing a huge opportunity by not releasing 30-40 inch iPads. Think about it: ultimate tabletop gaming, makes smartboards obsolete, interactive movable secondary television, revolutionary sign/kiosk system, ideal office workstation, innumerable app-enabled uses...

Interesting, I keep thinking I'll build something like this, although I note that Seiki discontinued their big 4K screen. The key for me in previous "smart boards" has always been that drawing on them has been like drawing on a tablet, which is to say the "ink" is way behind the pen when it comes to updating the display. It is the same experience on a slow timeshare system where you're typing doesn't get echoed for a dozen or more characters. And when composing text, you at least have a moderately easy way to back up and correct but when drawing not so much. That and the occasional sample glitch that suddenly has the pen making a mark 2 miles off screen you get this weird across the screen line.

microsoft gave us 3 of these at 14k last year. since then it has been used as a giant monitor. video looks cool though

So... not good?

Let's hope it's better than the big touch screen the BBC were using during the election. Anyone know what that was running?

Edit: May have been http://www.u-touch.co.uk/84-4k-multitouch-screen-ir/ or http://www.idonix.com/projects/vizTouchScreen2011.

I assumed that was cgi - like a weather forecaster waving at a bluescreen. Did she have any way of choosing the seat? I think it may have been 100% controlled offscreen.

Totally farcical UX - the screen had 3 functions yet she had to walk back and forth to slap a tile to switch them. Its a bad sign to measure Fitt's distance in meters! A remote would have been more sensible but it was for the pretense of being tech, not actual practicality.

Give me Surface Desk and I might consider going back to MS again.

How would this compete with HP's Slate 17? It's an android tablet-desktop thing. $450! http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/us/en/pdp/desk...

Why isn't Microsoft ever transparent about the cost of their devices before release dates? In my opinion their product announcements would have much more attention and excitement if they gave a date and a price. But most of the time it's just, oh look there gonna release something sometime soon for some price. One can't even decide if it's in their budget.

Microsoft announces things while they are still finalizing, or even sometimes while still designing, what might not even always become a product: this gives them a chance to get feedback from potential clients as part of large semi-public beta programs and back room negotiations. They probably do not know when it will be ready, nor have they yet decided how much it will cost.

So the Surface has come full circle? This is basically the original Surface.

Which is great, by the way. Merely an observation.

Anything that fixes the first ten minutes of every meeting nonsense where everyone trys to get the AV figured out.

Anything.

Hackernews, we've made a whiteboard which lets you broadcast everything you write with a normal marker to a mobile device. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo

Sounds like this is the result of Microsoft's acquisition of Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel?

Most likely. The UX should be great if it's a direct extension. They really nailed the interaction feel.

Correct.

Everyone seems to be missing a huge market for these: Schools.

I can see it improving the collaborative learning experience. But in my opinion, this makes remote teaching in first world schools a viable possibility.

There's been players in that space for years now: http://education.smarttech.com/en/products/4000-series

Smart boards are nice but they're not collaborative right? That's the killer app with this.

I don't know about the newer smart boards but the old ones sucked hard. This windows surface device seems like it will be using an actual digitizer and it wont be using a projector.

MS's previous enterprise offering in this space was the SMART Room System for Lync. It worked really well...as long as your collaborators were also on Lync. No standards based video conference connectivity, and good luck if you tried to use the system for an external collaboration/training/demo (pick your flavor of WebEx, Google Hangouts, etc.). With Lync being absorbed into Skype for Business I hope they will approach these new offerings with less of a silo type mentality. The tight integration with a Surface looks great, but what happens when someone brings in an iPad?

My highschool had SmartBoards in every classroom. There were only a handful of teachers who knew how to use them. The rest just used it as a projector screen. Rest assured that the same will be said for the Surface Hub; good teachers will use it appropriately, bad teachers will just put slides up on it.

I'm curious nobody mentioned the problem that is Skype. For many companies, NSA snooping means that Skype cannot be used for any sensitive stuff (which translates into a defacto company wide ban).

Is there an API for that?

Looks expensive. I don't want one--it really only has value for multi-person use. Hence it's target and likely price.

I assume the UI will suck and it will be almost unused at any place that purchases one, cause of it.

A big thank you to the Microsoft social media team currently targeting HN for this and your other fine submissions.

You can see the previous submissions for the OP here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=SanderMak

Doesn't look like a social media team.

I think you significantly overestimate the size and composition of HN's audience.

They forget to mention one critical feature: it includes free NSA spying for all your critical projects. Not sure that's something you want to do if you are a foreign (i.e. non American) company.

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