Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype 183
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Yeah. Neat trick but who's going to use it?
Re:Right... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Right... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered the Total Cost of Ownership?
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Have you considered the Total Cost of Ownership?
If a wife costs too much there's still mum or a sister. Point is, a man never really has to do laundry, there's always someone to do it for him :P
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In this particular instance.. it's called a maid.
Didn't they have one of those (Score:2)
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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...
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How do you manage usage? I mean, some socks get worn, and hence washed, more than others leading to greyness. I have now have 40 socks in various shades of grey.
Actually, I don't really care but thanks for reading.
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here is a very frightening video of the thing in action. be sure to turn up your sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irT_Ek4BQRc&feature=related [youtube.com]
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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.
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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
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Thing is, I don't think any of this is something that couldn't already be done with the original surface technology.
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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
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Basically
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Hehe.. again. Microsoft didn't invent surface technology. It's been around since the 60s.
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Yeah, but you don't need this technology to do that. The original surface interface already supports that.
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So do current, boring, 2D monitors. It's called layering. Happens every time you do a CT or an MRI. Hell, if your eyesight was good enough, you could do it on an iPhone.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Multitouch technology
Microsoft : build it into a table, 2nd stage build a bigger table
Apple : build it into a tablet, 2nd stage build it into a handheld ...says it all really about the market they aim at
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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!?
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Oh, come on. The potholes aren't THAT deep!
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not so silly really it's a work in progress.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were attempting to get a real 3d projection floating above the desk.
Microsoft have more than enough resources to throw at a project like this, even if is a dead end, who else would do it?
if you were from 1908 you would be amazed at what has been achieved in 2008 so what will we have in 2108? have we pretty much peaked now or would we be amazed at what technology is in use in 2108?
working 3d display technology who here wouldn't want
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Note: mostly funny, but sort of serious
Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
A bigger ass table!
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C'mon post a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY [youtube.com]
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
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Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
awaiting SilveLife (Score:2, Flamebait)
Microsoft's flash competitor mmorpg that works on tracing paper
My company (Score:4, Interesting)
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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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Suppose the table is displaying an organizational chart. You might want to display details for one branch to that branch's supervisor, but omit all the details for another branch. You could want this for legal reasons, i.e. employee privacy, or just to focus on the part the supervisor needed to know.
When I was in the army, for a time I was with a maintenance troop. There were dozens of vehicles, many of which were duplicates, and those vehicles normally loaded lots of tools and
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Nah.. Groundtroops wouldn't be the ones to benefit from this that much..
This stuff would be at the local command, with sensors giving accurate realtime data. One could zoom in and see all soldiers and vehicles overlaid atop satellite surveillance maps.
With that, one could SEE the battlefield realtime... It would be a sight to see. And one then would have the ability for UWB viewing of camera data on vehicles and those soldiers with cameras. I get goosebumbs thinking of this sort of pervasive implementation.
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I believe you are thinking of a different Microsoft technology:
http://photosynth.net/ [photosynth.net]
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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?
Ok, this is what kills me. Someone adds a new perspective on technology and interfaces and people run to yell how it doesn't matter because THEY don't understand it or see how it could be useful or see past today's use of techonology to imagine applications for it.
The examples given are 'basic', but the pote
Well specifically because it's from MS (Score:2)
A great many people on this site don't want to believe MS could do anything cool or useful or innovative. Thus when they do produce something, it has to be hated on. If this was coming from Google, I'd give good odds that the grand parent would be gushing over how cool it was and all the neat things it could do.
That is, unfortunately, one of the things you'll get in the Slashdot comments. People let their bias of the source influence their appraisal of the technology. MS is the big evil, so their stuff gets
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Not all of us are haters.
I use their ideas on how I can make it for myself, cause Ill know I cant afford it. Thinking how I could implement it in Open Source stuff, here's what I come up with.
You need 2 projectors with a infrared tracking system. I'd use a wiimote for basics, and its cheap. Now, take the table and mount the 2 projectors inside pointing up. Now, here comes the tricky part: how do we display both images? Simple: Polarization. We put a horiz on projector 1 and a vert on projector 2. Big deal..
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Sounds like this advanced restaurateur simulator [wikipedia.org] is reality at last!
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It seems that a large part of Surface is "physical computing". Surface already interacts with different physical devices you place on the table. This is just adding another aspect.
Is it useful? I don't know. A piece of paper is probably more responsive than a software interface and it is more intuitive to use. Want to see the other layer? Put down a piece of paper. Want to see it in two places? Put down two pieces of paper. Want to get rid of the other layer? Pick the paper up.
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That's an excellent idea. We could even make it show dynamically an enlarged inset of the scene for closer inspection and give it a cool name like magnifyier [sourceforge.net].
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Wait, I'm confused.
What about Surface didn't allow tracing before?
All this provides is a completely separate view for the tracing paper. From your description, it sounds like if you had that, you could just print it, no problem -- and you could trace either way.
It's not about whether it's open source or not. It's about whether there's any point at all. I get why Surface is cool -- I really don't get this.
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I can simply trace what is on the screen. Maybe its just the way I work, but also printing some of my stuff is a pain in the ass.
Printing is more of a pain in the ass than tracing it by hand? Who's your IT guy [thedailywtf.com]?
new warning stickers (Score:5, Funny)
Glyph Tracking (Score:3, Interesting)
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!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Damn! Why didn't I think of that?? I would be RICH!!!
Rich, I tell you!
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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.
Direct link to vid... (Score:2)
http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/video/SecondLight.wmv [microsoft.com]
Come on guys.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Maybe there's no usefulness at this moment, but my guess is that if enough geeks spend some time with it, there will be all sorts of useful, cool things that nobody, not even the designers thought of. This is the way of things.
Look at some of the early attempts to hack game consoles... now there are lots of things you can do with a modded console... avoiding region restrictions, home media servers, and storing your games on hard drive instead of loading disks come to mind.
Just give it time.
The first generat
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Its a big ass table
There. Fixed that [youtube.com] for you.
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what about tent surface prototypes (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
D&D! (Score:2)
Is it wrong of me to immediately think of D&D and this technology?
Since the picture can move with the paper, I can imagine having goblins pop out of no where when I toss a bunch of 1x1" pieces of paper on to the table. Then using the motion sensor part of this tech, the images move with the paper around on the terrain already displayed on the table.
I know my wife would prefer this table to having a projector permanently over our dining table.
IR Sensors make the paper irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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The key difference with how they are doing it is it scales.....no matter how many people join in, performance doesn't take a hit. two images are always being projected at all times and you can have two people or hundreds moving their 'windows' around and the setup doesn't see any difference.
Even over a large table, I don't see how having more than three or four people sweeping sheets of paper around to view the secondary image is going to be in any way practical. What kind of application are you thinking of
It was at Siggraph (Score:2)
This was displayed at Siggraph.
I think it is enormously clever, while at the same time enormously useless.
It was pretty obvious that they had no way to know where the paper was, so they mostly demonstrated it as an x-ray into the image that was on the screen. I do not see any reason why the paper's location could not be determined by the touch detector, however.
I would think any practical use could be done by software moving a virtual "paper". One thing this would do is allow the papers to overlap.
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Any 3D viruses for it yet?
I know this! (Score:3, Funny)
This is Unix!
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Unix would never lower-itself to the indignity of being run on a "big ass table". LINK - www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
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No, but there are some pop-ups.
Re:How long (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I've been blocking video projectors with objects to annoy my teachers for years. I claim prior art!
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this is pretty cool stuff, it allows the user to display an image on the table of say a building, and different people (say engineers working on different sections like plumbing and electrical) can throw on their own parts of the plans to see if they are going to conflict and to easily show others. having actually worked on large projects where one of the biggest hurdles is inter discipline co operation i can see a real use for this.
if this was apple developi
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You pretend to know me and then allude that I like Apple?
Wow.
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Yeah this is the first interesting original innovation I have seen from MS in the past 25 years or so. Very neat stuff.
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Not really. In their advertisments they talk-about ordering your food from "the table".
Why?
I'd much rather order my food from the cute college girl wearing a decolletage-displaying shirt. Not THAT'S innovation.
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I'll take the table.
Re:How long (Score:5, Informative)
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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...
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Apparently they only stopped doing so in 1623 [wikipedia.org].
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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.
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I dunno, the actual technology seems really simple. But on the other hand it is rather innovative and I'ce never seen it before.
A lot of good ideas seem really obvious in retrospect. They're the kind of things that make you go, "Huh, why didn't I think of that?" Being a good inventor is about having the insight to think of those simple things no one else has thought of yet, actually going and and doing them, and then demonstrating how they are useful. Probably if it doesn't seem simple in retrospect, it won't be that useful either.
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Everyone on Slashdot except for you.
Re:I dont mean to be rude, or anti progress.. but. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So how does this benefit anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Again, I seem to be missing the point -- what are the "benefits of a third dimension"?
I realize I can hold a piece of paper above the table, which shows an alternate projection. Why would I want to, when I can just drag a virtual piece of paper around the table?
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How about for board games where you want to be able to view your position without having it on the table for everyone to see? If the device is able to sense that you're holding Alpha team's HUD and not Bravo team's it could show you only your map view rather than the opponent's. I'm sure there's other possible benefits, but the beauty of technology is that if it's possible, someone will come up with something really cool and then everyone will shift their thinking to "Why would anybody want to be restrict
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I'm sure Microsoft isn't sure either. That's what 'research' is for. It's an interesting idea, let's implement it, hey that's cool. Mmm - is it useful?
It *may* be that users work quicker and better with physical objects than user interface elements on the screen. It may be that people just like playing with it because it is cool, and this aids problem-solving/productivity in some way.
At the moment, my gut feeling is with you - it's very cool, but probably not particularly useful. But I may be wrong.
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it doesn't.
with a little bit of software, a thin tablet PC can easily work as this second display. add some spatial sensors so it know where on the table it is and how high and now you have something that will kick this things butt.
place your head over the display, you will see the glare of the projector that will wash out the main display.
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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. ;-)
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If we just sat around talking about the specifications of the thing, that would be boring. You can only say it once. Sometimes there's just nothing interesting to say. Make the conversation what you want it to be....what interesting do YOU have to say about it?
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Any would be a good start.
Basically most people are saying what they think about the thing, or telling what they think through humor
Which I find overly predictable. Although the topics may be news for nerds or stuff that matters, the discussions are only karma whoring, Microsoft bashing, and +5 funny. I'm frustrated because Slashdot used to be filled with posts from engineers. Slashdot used to be the Scientific American of discussion groups. Now it's like Digg on
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You could change your settings to downmod anything funny and upmod anything insightful, informative, or underrated... that might reduce your time wastage although it won't create insightful or informative posts out of thin air.