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Microsoft Technology

Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype 183

Posted by samzenpus from the look-deep-into-the-table dept.
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."
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Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype More

Secondlight, Microsoft's New Surface Prototype

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  • Right... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by complete loony ( 663508 ) <Jeremy.Lakeman@g ... .com minus punct> on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @10:32PM (#25564551)

    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?

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

      • Re:Right... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @10:45PM (#25564651) Journal
        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... (Score:5, Funny)

          by Swizec ( 978239 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:09PM (#25564795) Homepage

          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: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by 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: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by 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

            • Thing is, I don't think any of this is something that couldn't already be done with the original surface technology.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 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

          • 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: (Score:2)

            by QuantumG ( 50515 ) *

            Hehe.. again. Microsoft didn't invent surface technology. It's been around since the 60s.

    • Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Perseid ( 660451 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @10:46PM (#25564657)
      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.

      • 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

        • Except that the table MS built had nothing to do with touch - it uses several cameras that are inside a box, right below the glass table-top, which track & triangulate motion on/above the glass. The 'surface' is simply a boundary...there is no touch sensitive grid such as used on the iPhone etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 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: (Score:2)

        by 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: (Score:3, Funny)

          by mr_mischief ( 456295 )

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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by afidel ( 530433 )
            Funny, but I was referring to the fact that you can have two roads that appear to be parallel but are really separated by a hundred or more feet vertically =)

    • 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

    • What are you talking about? This is the best tool ever for a DM.. no more having to have players draw maps, but you can do all sorts of interesting things with showing one image and hiding the other. Brilliant!

      Note: mostly funny, but sort of serious

  • Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Centurix ( 249778 ) <centurixNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @10:36PM (#25564587) Homepage

    A bigger ass table!

  • Microsoft's flash competitor mmorpg that works on tracing paper

  • My company (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Datamonstar ( 845886 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:05PM (#25564775)
    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.
    • I have the impression that these layoffs were in the planning already, the current crisis is just a very welcome excuse.

  • What's the advantage over doing it in software? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:09PM (#25564797) Homepage

    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.

    • 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

      • 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.

    • 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

      • 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

        • 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..

      • it can now also see how full the glass is, to send your wait-staff to your table sooner to refill your drink

        Sounds like this advanced restaurateur simulator [wikipedia.org] is reality at last!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by naoursla ( 99850 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrMr ( 219533 )
      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
      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].

  • new warning stickers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:15PM (#25564837) Homepage Journal
    "Do not stare into table with remaining eye."

  • Glyph Tracking (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bones3D_mac ( 324952 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:29PM (#25564911)

    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)

    by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @11:33PM (#25564937)
    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!
    • No, you can set the paper directly onto the table.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 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.

  • You can find it in TFA, but if you're like I usually am and don't read it... there is a video, just to let those interested know...

    http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/video/SecondLight.wmv [microsoft.com]

  • Come on guys.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Idiomatick ( 976696 ) on Thursday October 30, 2008 @12:26AM (#25565261)

    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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
      The multitouch they made was great. But this one... uh, I really fail to see either the cool factor or the usefulness.

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
          Except that, usually, the ideas about the potential uses come before their realization. People who hack consoles know what they intend on doing before beginning. With this technology, I really don't see a single interesting application. The whole point of screen was to not need paper anymore. Why put it back ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skeeto ( 1138903 )

      Its a big ass table

      There. Fixed that [youtube.com] for you.

  • what about tent surface prototypes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Thursday October 30, 2008 @12:43AM (#25565329) Homepage

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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