The Story of Microsoft's Surface Hub | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Microsoft's Surface Hub

fastcompany.com

55 pointstechnologizer20 comments

Looks like they're trying to bring back the ghost of the original Surface (not the tablet one). I developed for the original Surface and SUR-40 while in grad school - in fact, my master's thesis was about certain forms of interactions enabled on tabletop computers.

The first surface was a cool product, which I still believe was just too early (poor technology: needed a high DPI screen, sluggish processor, etc; terrible software, high price tag, smartphones and tablets were not what they are now so the idea of hub was limited). The SUR-40 was a disaster (the screen would bend when you touched it, ffs).

There's something powerful in hub computers, but not in the TV form. The tabletop form was right all along - collaborating around a table enables kinds of interactions that are not possible on a white board (notably by using physical objects in conjunction with the tabletop). The SUR-40 had the ambition of being usable both in whiteboard and table mode, but that's probably overdoing it. Interested to see where this goes, but the high price tag makes me doubtful. Make a $999 coffee table computer that every nerd can have in their living room to play boardgames, use to swap vacation photos/movies between phones and beam them up to the TV, collaborate on floorpans, etc. and you may have something.

I remember when I first heard of the original Surface I was desperate to own one and followed every bit of news I could find. I do hope that future iterations of the hub will revisit the table paradigm, though now that I've cooled down my nerd lust I do realize that there may be some ergonomic concerns. Having to lean over a table to see the display properly could be a literal pain in the neck over the long term.

I would love a hybrid between a drawing board, a Surface table, and... something else. I mean, not for programing but more for another, art-oriented, tasks.

It looks to me like Microsoft is trying to position HoloLense to scratch that particular itch... They could potentially have experiences like the original Surface table, but using AR over a normal table, rather than an active table.

It would sure be weird to walk into a meeting room, and have everyone put on their AR goggles, but if it turns out to be really effective, it could be better than a Surface table in many ways.

I always thought an interesting direction for that type of machine would be to resurrect the form factor of the old "cocktail"-style arcade game cabinets:

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/330868472385-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_arcade_cabinet#Cockt...

I.e. screen in the middle of the table, with 2 or 4 interaction mechanisms (stylus? mouse? touchpad?) along the edges. Make the surface low enough that people can pull up a stool or small chair. Give the users an easy way to flip the display back and forth and it'd be an interesting setup for collaborative work.

It's 2015, we have multitouch screens, why would we want clunky styluses/mouse/touchpads? The original surface had the nice property of being very spill/damage resistant.

I like that they're making it in the US and that they didn't just knee-jerk "OK, who are we having make it?"

Actually, I'm kind of liking a variety of things that MS has been doing lately. Heck, if I was going to start on mobile development I might actually start with the (much smaller) Windows ecosystem rather than trying to bubble to the top of the iOS or Android markets - the absolute number of users may be smaller, but if you do a good job the number that actually see and can purchase your app may be a lot higher than you'll see as you compete against 300 similar apps on the larger markets. Further, if MS keeps doing a decent job while Apple and Google work to find ways to irritate users and developers it may end up being an "in on the ground floor" type of option.

It's somewhat telling that Microsoft had to build their own captouch factory to produce sensing circuits of this size. Either Asian factories couldn't do it or, more likely, they wouldn't do it for the small quantity and massive BOM and scrap % involved at this size.

I really think something like this, if not this, is the future of engineering. Sometimes I think people underestimate the value of having a big space to "push around" various bits on and think things through. Having the resolution to be able to do that at scale means being able to walk up and have a high resolution photograph be literally 4" x 7" on an 84" diagonal screen would change everything.

Assuming 4K screens though, this is only 52PPI on the 84" model. And you would ideally want 200+ dpi. Not that anyone is going to make 84" 16K screens anytime soon (interestingly they are "possible" in that the manufacturing is known, but without an embedded data channel you would not be able to get data to them quickly enough.

what? you don't need 200 dpi when you're 3-8 feet away

But you do when you're 1-3 feet away.

How about we make a system that only utilizes (for example) 8x8 "chunks" of pixels. We can put distance sensors on the display; if anything gets close enough, it can "downshift" to 1x1 pixels.

> But you do when you're 1-3 feet away

It's not like a regular screen that's 1-2 feet away, where you're reading 9-12 point fonts all day. This is a collaborative table, that's going to have multiple people standing around it. Sizes of things will be bigger so people can read them from further away, upside down, etc.

I use my whiteboard from 1 - 2 feet away generally. Yes, I do stand back from it, and no, I rarely write with a whiteboard marker at 10 CPI, but I stick post-it notes on it, and pictures, and copied pages from books, all of which I would want to do on a device that could replace it. Look at the 'murder board' on any cop show procedural for an example of a working "board."

Outside a conference room, I can't think of any compelling use for the thing except dungeons and dragons. But I really want it for that.

It's nice to see this make the headlines, I was at Microsoft M&A group in 2012 when the acquisition became public. Satya has received a lot of praise for the direction Microsoft has been going in, but I still feel that some of the groundwork was laid by Steve. PPI is a good example with the acquisition becoming public in summer of 2012.

When most people today talk about Steve, they often make it sound like he was aloof to the needs of the industry, the fact that Microsoft needed to be re-organized, etc. I don't feel like he didn't know these things, but more-so that it took a change of leadership to rally the company with different goals. [edited to add more commentary]

Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. "We have invented a new technology called multi-touch," he boasted, in one of the more reality-distorting things ever said during an Apple keynote. Han, by contrast, had been careful to share credit in his TED talk: "I'm not the only one doing it, there are a lot of people doing it."

I remember that. I had watched Mr Han's demo a while back BEFORE the iPhone announcement.

There are many exciting openings for creating augmented workspaces. But they are probably not around massive and massively expensive devices like this one (even if Microsoft has carried out some really good research along the way). IMHO, the focus should be on designing small and modular components that could be appropriated, recombined, and adapted to each concrete case.

Using wall as the display makes way more sense to me: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-envisions-pc-as-projector-wit...

It's another idea that's been proposed. I think we might be waiting for the technology to catch up, or a flashy implementation to excite everyone.

Bill Gates proposed using the wall as a display in a 2009 talk he gave at UW Seattle - he said he saw it as something that was definitely going to happen eventually, it was a question of when. And the idea has been presented fictionally in Fahrenheit 451, if not before.

What i really, REALLY, would like to Know is what happened to the PixelSense Technology of the Sur40 Display.

You could put a document face-down on it and have a scan immediately available. How amazing would this be on a Surface Tablet, or Hub

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