Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be taking the wraps off “Milan”, a project five years in the making, and the first of what the company is calling a “surface computer”.
The Microsoft Surface tabletop PC, for which the company has created both the hardware and software, turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.
The surface computer will be able to recognize physical objects and allow hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps.
Although these computers will be available later this year, they’ll be unaffordable for most people; The expensive components required to allow multiple users to touch the device simultaneously give it a price tag approaching $10,000.
So for the time being, the new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.
The demos I saw online of this just blew my mind, and the possibilities for applications that can run on this type of computers are really interesting and cool. I hope that it’ll become affordable for domestic use in the near future, because I for one would love to have one sitting in my living room.
For more:
And when you see all the excitement of steve jobs for the scrolling in his iphone… 🙂
Looks like microsoft is not that interested in web services. This explains why they are leaving google with all these big acquisitions.
while google makes money from businesses microsoft aims at the households. this is what makes google more popular among common moe’s.
So, does this mean they gave up on the “virtual reality” systems they promised us 15 years ago!? I’m so disappointed 🙁
Just messing. This seems like it might have potential but I’m a bit gun-shy when it comes to MS and promotion of new tech… seems like they promote everything, and abandon most of it when it doesn’t sell. I’d rather they were a bit more realistic and a bit more ready to REALLY push a good technology, whether it has early success or not.
Nice idea but…
(none of the bloggers have picked up on this yet) this is gonna fail as miserably as tablet computers did – that too was a Microsoft initiative.
This business of re-designing the wheel is counter-intuitive.
I am researching on surface computing, but yet to see posts beyond 2007 with some next level maturity. Awaiting eagerly.
http://msjots.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-will-surface-next.html