[lit-ideas] Surface!!!
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 00:09:36 -0500
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Microsoft unveils new Surface computer
By JESSICA MINTZ, AP Business Writer*Wed May 30, 12:58 AM ET*
Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped
computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to
everyday objects.
The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology
conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile
USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.
and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table
base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five
cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users
can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and
objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world
items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.
Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a
time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the
Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an
on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley
face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of
hair.
With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn't
immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects
prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five
years.)
Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new
cell phones at T-Mobile stores. When customers plop a phone down on the
screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the
handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging
icons toward the phone.
Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around
the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards
card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be
able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or
a room key and dragging their menu items "onto" the card.
At Harrah's locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah's
venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner
reservations.
Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface,
including one for sharing digital photographs.
Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface's surface; digital
photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen.
Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen
using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the
corners to enlarge the images — behavior made possible by the advanced
graphics support deep inside Windows Vista.
"It's not a touch screen, it's a grab screen," Bolger said.
Historically, Microsoft has focused on creating new software, giving
computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left
hardware manufacturing to others. (Some recent exceptions include the Xbox
360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that
developed Surface.)
For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given
six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface
applications.
Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on
Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology's inner workings
under wraps will limit what early customers — the businesses Microsoft is
targeting first with the machine — will be able to do with it.
But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by Surface.
Surface is "important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as
demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how
to innovate, and innovate in a big way," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst
at Jupiter Research.
Copyright (c) 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information
contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten
or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated
Press.
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