Microsoft Surface. Wow!

[Ashrem Bayle]

Imagine that is your table top. (Minus the text of course.) You double tap your miniature and his character sheet pops up beside him. Maybe you even tap the weapon/attack you intend to use.

Tap the target you wish to attack, then tap the dice to roll. All the math is done, the character sheet for the enemy is updated with the damage...etc. etc.

Maybe there is a round tracker floating around the board to help you track initiative.

Imagine when you tap the character, the spaces he can legally move to are highlighted.

Tell the board what type of spell you are casting and you drag the spell "template" around to determine which enemies get affected.

Awesome....

 

[Michael Morris]

I foresee another Segwe(sp?)

It does look like the ultimate game table but it's price is set too high for really wide adoption at 5k. On top of that it seems like a one trick pony, a gimic. Sure it allows you to essentially play with pictures and videos intuitively and quickly get files out of devices but other than that it doesn't seem to have utility. How do you word process or spreadsheet on it? How do you write code? Ultimately what little I've seen doesn't show it acting as anything more than a media portal, and at 5k it's pricing itself way outside the market for that.

I'm sorry, but you're flat wrong. Segeway failed because there was no market for what amounted to an over-hyped, over-priced scooter. This is an entirely new interface approach which will be picked up by other developers.

Price is a very poor and ultimately short sighted way at looking at this. The first PC's where in the $3,000 to $5,000 range in 1980 -- in today's dollars that's around $5,000 - $10,000. It will be ten to twenty years years before this technology gets to be as ubiquitous as PC's are now, but it's coming.

The move in computing is towards intuitive interfaces. Mice and keyboards aren't intuitive. Voice and gestures are. Voice recognition is starting to become useful. Gesture recognition is becoming useful in devices like this. Computers will in the end move towards conforming to our needs, not us to theirs. Only a select few people ever should need worry about the underpinnings of computers - those who enjoy it and make a career of it. The goal for us, the programmers - is to develop computer systems so intuitive and responsive that you as the end user don't need to worry about learning and studying an interface.

This technology truly is exciting. Sedgeway is not - very bad comparison.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Computers will in the end move towards conforming to our needs, not us to theirs. Only a select few people ever should need worry about the underpinnings of computers - those who enjoy it and make a career of it. The goal for us, the programmers - is to develop computer systems so intuitive and responsive that you as the end user don't need to worry about learning and studying an interface.

Right. And that's the reason why that thing is as innovative as great!. It's a huge step forward in interfacing (okay, the idea was there for a long time... but seeing that thing... y'know what I mean).

And for the "cannot write on it"... Yeah, if this thing advances, you will probably use it in combination with:

1) Voice recognition.
2) Pen recognition.
3) Keyboard emulation on the screen.

Because, in the end, the keyboard isn't the best thing that exists, it's just the best thing we have now.

The Surface is a step closer to everyday-technology: See, today, older people are struggling with modern computers, because they're not used to it. It's not intuitive.
Innovative technology must be usable by just looking at it. Everything else is... bad.

I'm happy with that development. Immensely happy.

 

[Michael Morris]

Couple ideas on what this could be used for.

1. Harrah's will be one of the first customers - so depending on the sensitivity of the table's cameras to see the objects on the surface they could use special dice and cards that have their face values marked on the back in microprint as part of the back pattern so that the computer can see what it is but a human player could not. This allows the house an extra layer of protection from cheating and something casinos *will* invest in since with all their vigilance against cheats and honest errors they still lose a couple million a year per location
2. When the user presses their finger to verify the charges the table could take an infrared snapshot of the user's fingerprint for verification.

That's just off the top of my head. If I brainstormed for a few days I could come up with more.

 

[WhatGravitas]

That's just off the top of my head. If I brainstormed for a few days I could come up with more.

I see great use in following things:

1) Hyperlinking: Letters, books, and more could have a small barcode on the back/forward. After reading it, the computer downloads the appropriate e-mail/website/whatever - just by putting it on the desk.
For scientific stuff, that's huge. Crawling through references can be a royal PitA!

2) OCR/Scanning: With sufficiently high resolution, this can be a poor man's (or rich man's) scanner, far more intuitive than a flat-bed scanner. Imagine: Press it on the screen, and it remains there for your future perusal.

3) New forms of entertainment: Like the Wii. Just cooler. It's a great music instrument: Imagine you're a DJ, with access to all music and sounds in existence (or saved on your HD), reacting to your movements (you can control it by your speed, number of fingers and so on).

Of course, just top of my head.

 

[Kaodi]

This certainly seems promising.

The one thing though, I was thinking... With greater size, comes more room for hardware. With more and more powerful hardware, comes an electricity bill to make the average person run screaming in terror.

Actually, that leads into another thought... I wonder how well you could make one of these things work for multiple people at a time... Four times more power isn't quite so bad if four people can use it for different things at once...

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I'm sorry, but you're flat wrong. Segeway failed because there was no market for what amounted to an over-hyped, over-priced scooter. This is an entirely new interface approach which will be picked up by other developers...snip...This technology truly is exciting. Sedgeway is not - very bad comparison.

After googling it and finding more info on functionality that wasn't shown in the first demo I saw I agree that it does look a lot more useful. And it would be the true ultimate gaming table that's for sure.

 

[Michael Morris]

This certainly seems promising.

The one thing though, I was thinking... With greater size, comes more room for hardware. With more and more powerful hardware, comes an electricity bill to make the average person run screaming in terror.

Actually, that leads into another thought... I wonder how well you could make one of these things work for multiple people at a time... Four times more power isn't quite so bad if four people can use it for different things at once...

Size for somethings is going to be determined by the fact that human beings are size X to Y and we aren't going to evolve to be any bigger or smaller anytime soon. This thing doesn't have to be 30" but that's what is comfortable to us. The components that detect objects on the table do not have to be at the scale they are, but that's a comfortable size.

Cellphones being as small as they are is a bit of a fad - keyboards and keys need to be a certain size for comfort reasons - there's no real way around this. While you can cram more processing power into the space, the space isn't going to shrink below a certain point.

I mean, the desktop PC hasn't physically become smaller for close to two decades now. Other types of computers have arisen to fill mobile niches, but PC's are the size they are due largely to human comfort standards.

 

[Megatron]

An oversized LCD tablet? Wacom did it years ago. Not news.

 

[Plane Sailing]

An oversized LCD tablet? Wacom did it years ago. Not news.

You need to look again. Wacom have never done multi-input devices, let alone computers with the ability to communicate wirelessly and directly with devices in the way that the demonstrations show.

If it was an oversized LCD tablet it wouldn't be news. However, it is a long, long, long way past that 16 year old concept.

Look again.