Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype

Barence writes "Microsoft has literally added another dimension to its touchscreen table technology Surface. The new table projects an image through the table itself, so that any translucent material (such as tracing paper or perspex) held above the Surface screen displays a different image to what you see on the table's display. This means you can have a satellite image of a town on the table, and have the street names projected on to a piece of paper that the user holds above the map. Or you could have a photo of a car, with the tracing paper displaying images of its innards."

Right...

[complete loony (663508)]

So... it can display a second image that is completely invisible unless I hold a piece of paper in front of it.

Is it just me or does that sound kind of silly?

Re:

[amRadioHed (463061)]

Yeah. Neat trick but who's going to use it?

Re:Right...

[phantomfive (622387)]

Seriously. I like the idea of doing research for the sake of research, and I would probably respect this more, except Microsoft keeps representing it as

1. The coolest thing they have ever come up with.
2. The future of computing.

and it is neither, it is just cool research. It's so cute the way Microsoft has gotten all senile and out of touch in its old age.

OK, off to do laundry now. When will they make a robot that does my laundry for me? Now THAT will be progress.

Re:Right...

[Swizec (978239)]

OK, off to do laundry now. When will they make a robot that does my laundry for me? Now THAT will be progress.

It's called a washing machine.

Re:

[snowraver1 (1052510)]

He's talking about a folding machine, and it would truly be a great invention. Just dump in the laundry and out comes a folded pile. Bonus if it sorts socks!

Re:Right...

[Swizec (978239)]

It's called a wife.

Re:Right...

[QuantumG (50515)]

Have you considered the Total Cost of Ownership?

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

In this particular instance.. it's called a maid.

Didn't they have one of those

[RustinHWright (1304191)]

on Lost in Space? It even wrapped everything in tidy plastic bundles.

Re:

[MrMr (219533)]

Bonus if it sorts socks!
Fixed that years ago: choose the kind of socks you like best and standardize. I can now even throw away a single sock without looking for the other one...

Re:

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

I believe it could be profoundly useful.

Expand the size to that of a conference table or put it up as a white board(as shown in the episode of SNL with the fake Sarah palin skit) and grab a team of engineers to brainstorm and manipulate UML and other diagrams in real time in front of a live studio audience(shareholders: "ooooh! ahhhhh!")

Sure beats dry-erase markers or e-mailing small-ass graphic files back and forth.

Re:

[Artifakt (700173)]

I would suspect it can handle an image with a great number of layers, where the user could pick any one to be the layer that is projected through the first surface onto the upper surface. As quickly as a Photoshop type programs can manipulate layers, there are some real organizational uses for this. Any time you have a large group of people who need to schedule something complex together, being able to piecemeal copy many bits of information onto someone's basic instructions is handy, and that could certain

Re:

[cmacb (547347)]

Seriously. I like the idea of doing research for the sake of research, and I would probably respect this more, except Microsoft keeps representing it as

1. The coolest thing they have ever come up with.

But in a way it *IS* the coolest thing they ever came up with.

Most of what they sell they got from someone else one way or another.

Most of what they patent is prior art that just hasn't been challenged yet.

Most of what they show in their R&D web pages is nonsense.

Maybe they can get th

Re:

[phantomfive (622387)]

Yeah, you're right. It may very well be the coolest thing they've ever come up with. After posting I realized I should have said, "They think it's the coolest thing around." I've heard new college graduates tell me excitedly, "I'm working with the microsoft tablet!" as if it were the end of the world. To which I think, "So what? I've written my own proxy server and RPC library." Which I think was just as cool as being a tester for someone else's ideas, and (to me) was twice as interesting.

Basically

Re:Right...

[Perseid (660451)]

That was what I thought when I first saw a computer mouse. Do I expect this will revolutionize computing? Maybe, but probably not. Does that mean it's not cool? Naw, it's cool and my inner geek wants one. It's good to see Microsoft is indeed trying to make new stuff. That's more than we can say about them a lot of the time.

Re:

[Swizec (978239)]

In future you could perhaps have a two layer table by default, each layer being touchscreen and so on. This would make for something very useful.

Or maybe this technology could be built on and improved and you'd get a 3D map interface right on your "desk". How cool would THAT be!?

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

If 3D map technology is ever perfected it will be not from Redmond but from Carnegie Mellon. If you've ever been to Pittsburgh you'd understand why =)

Re:

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Oh, come on. The potholes aren't THAT deep!

Hooray!

[Centurix (249778)]

A bigger ass table!

Re:

[dwarg (1352059)]

C'mon post a link:

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

MOD PARENT UP!

[religious freak (1005821)]

That was f'in funny!

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]

awaiting SilveLife

[circletimessquare (444983)]

Microsoft's flash competitor mmorpg that works on tracing paper

My company

[Datamonstar (845886)]

Is actually laying off people as a result of the supposed economic crisis and yet still wasting away resources on Surface. We're wasting money on this crap because our new manager wants to be all "trendy" and make us look like some sort of cutting age IT outfit. I'd rather us keep on doing what we already do and have been highly profitable at instead of wasting time and money on this type of toy product and ruining people's lives in the process. There were some people who found out they were loosing their job by watching the evening news, but we still have enough money to buy and maintain electronic tables. Horrible.

Re:

[Artifakt (700173)]

Every good employee you have is an already selected and prescreened applicant for other jobs you might need done. He or she is already familiar with the company, knows many of the other employees, and you've already completed a bunch of paperwork on them. If he or she were lazy or inefficient or crooked, presumably you would have fired them, not waited until there was an excuse to lay them off. When you lay them off, they go elsewhere, and then when you need another job done, you have to pick from a bunch o

What's the advantage over doing it in software?

[dpbsmith (263124)]

Seems pointless to me.

If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?

Then it's always available regardless of whether you happen to have a nearby supply of tracing paper with the proper translucency characteristics.

And then it's equally visible with the main image, from all angle and lighting conditions, because it is in fact the main image.

Actually I don't understand why you'd only want street names displayed only with a small rectangular area, rather than toggling them on and off across the entire image.

Re:

[blankinthefill (665181)]

From TFA: "Using an infrared camera, the secondary "display" can also be used as a multitouch surface. What's more, it can display video." In conjunction with the part where you can use the TRANSLUCENT MATERIAL (doesn't HAVE to be PAPER)to see inside of something who's outsides are displayed on the main screen (ala their car example) I could actually see this being pretty damn useful. Besides, many many many things are invented that don't seem useful until someone thinks outside the box with them, then wa

new warning stickers

[Speare (84249)]

"Do not stare into table with remaining eye."

Glyph Tracking

[Bones3D_mac (324952)]

Sounds like pretty standard form of glyph tracking, similar to those outlandish "magic boards" the news networks seem to like playing around with to beguile the audience with more of the shiny.

HOW FRIGGING COOL!!!

[Jane Q. Public (1010737)]

Now, I can display one image on the large-format table, while I struggle to manually hold a 36" x 48" piece of frigging tracing paper a few inches over it, thereby rendering the tracing-paper image impractical, and the other image invisible!

Damn! Why didn't I think of that?? I would be RICH!!!

Rich, I tell you!

Re:

[Colonel Korn (1258968)]

No, you can set the paper directly onto the table.

And use a transparency, allowing you to see the bottom image as well. Not that this seems incredibly useful to me in the described application, but it could become an interesting capability.

Come on guys....

[Idiomatick (976696)]

Its fucking cool technology. Don't let fanboyism ruin this. Its a big table, its expensive. But its still fucking cool. Have you forgotten you are nerds? Who gives a shit how useful it is? Aren't people always arguing pro research that isn't about making a buck. Now when 'evil' microsoft does something all nerds like (making cool shit without having purely profit in mind) what happens? You bash it? I expect better :S

what about tent surface prototypes

[heroine (1220)]

Making computer screens out of $10,000 coffee tables for $2,000,000 home refinancers is so 2006. It's time for tent screen prototypes for the renters.

IR Sensors make the paper irrelevant

[argent (18001)]

This is cool technology, but if it can sense the location of IR-reflective objects on the table it doesn't need to actually project anything onto the paper. You could simply lay a frame on the table so it could sense the corners of the frame, then composite the image onto the display as if the frame was a sheet of paper. Then the transparency of the paper can be handled in software, you don't need the special surface, and you can have as many "sheets of paper" as you want.

Projecting onto objects above the table is cool, but not super practical. The "IR Mouse" is really more interesting.

Re:

[Divebus (860563)]

Any 3D viruses for it yet?

I know this!

[roman_mir (125474)]

This is Unix!

Re:

[JoCat (1291368)]

No, but there are some pop-ups.

Re:How long

[QuantumG (50515)]

If they're presenting it then you can be assured that it is already patent pending.

Which means its been in the lab for about 2 years already.. so in another 8 it might be on the market - but it'll be (more) boring by then, so it won't.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I've been blocking video projectors with objects to annoy my teachers for years. I claim prior art!

Re:How long

[Fourier404 (1129107)]

...since when did companies routinely invest in research and then give the results away for free, unless there was some other way to make money off it?

Re:

[capnkr (1153623)]

Look at the pic with TFA. There, behind the pretty flowers, revealed only by use of the Magic Translucent Paper, are what appear to be....
 
Frickin' sharks with frickin' lasers on their frickin' heads!
 
Apparently, Dr. Evil Ballmer has some type of plan to make MILLIONS off of this new technology...

Re:

[MrMr (219533)]

My guess: since the dawn of time
Apparently they only stopped doing so in 1623 [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[MiKM (752717)]

I'm sure some of the technology they developed for this is deserving of a patent (I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to patent some trivial/frivolous stuff, though). Patents aren't always bad, even for big corporations.

Re:

[MadnessASAP (1052274)]

I dunno, the actual technology seems really simple. But on the other hand it is rather innovative and I'ce never seen it before. Anyways it's a hell of alot more deserving then alot of the other patents that get handed out these days.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Everyone on Slashdot except for you.

Re:I dont mean to be rude, or anti progress.. but.

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

He's bitter beacuse he's dyslexic, and to add insult to injury he name himself "moniker" when he meant to type "monkier".

Re:

[Tubal-Cain (1289912)]

Think "X-ray vision"

Re:So how does this benefit anyone?

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

That's what I want to know.

Clearly I'm missing something obvious, but other than looking cool, is there any practical advantage to this?

It would seem that the very thing that makes it look cool -- that "added dimension" -- is also going to mean that the way in which the images are superimposed varies depending on where you're standing. The only way the roads in that "road map" idea would be in the right place is if you were hovering directly over the table -- except you'd be blocking the projector, and it still wouldn't be right towards the edges of the table.

I mean, I get the point of Surface itself. I do. What I don't get is what value this other layer has over doing the same thing in software.

Re:

[nacturation (646836)]

The only way the roads in that "road map" idea would be in the right place is if you were hovering directly over the table -- except you'd be blocking the projector, and it still wouldn't be right towards the edges of the table.

The projector projects from under the table using alternate frames on the surface. By applying current or not, the surface is either translucent or transparent, thus the second image projects through while the first remains on the table surface itself. If you're standing directly over it, you're in a perfect spot to see it and nothing gets blocked.

The cool thing about not doing it in software is that you can have the extra layer be a piece of translucent plastic on top of the surface... or you can hold it

Re:

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Yes, drawing on top of the image absolutely sounds like an awesome application. I wonder when they'll allow you to actually draw on the screen with a stylus, or maybe even your finger? They could call it, oh, a "touch screen". Maybe one of the products that uses such technology of the future will be from Microsoft and will be called "Surface" after the interface. ;-)