A couple weeks ago we got an early demo of the Surface SP1 update, and saw that one of the goals of which was to improve Windows-Surface cross-compatibility and encourage developers to make their apps touch-compatible. Looks like that work goes both ways, as it appears that Surface content and functionality is going to be kicking it with Windows 7.

Of course, the Surface’s hardware is mixed blessing: it makes development a lot easier when you’ve designed the hardware (just ask Apple), but makes it a pain when you’re trying to set your cool software up on similar but not identical platforms. Surface can handle a billion touches but the Dell Latitude used in this video demo (no offense, Dell) isn’t quite as capable, though of course it does everything it was designed to do.

It’s certainly not “OMG Surface on yr computar” but I’m looking forward to having lots of overlap between these two delicious Microsoft treats.

[via GottaBeMobile]

There are still a few new visible features, and it’s always fun to play with a Surface, so there’s a nice video for you to watch if you’re interested in how the Surface is changing and how Microsoft is responding to developer feedback. It’s easier to show them than explain them at length, so check them out in the video (hope you like my chin, which was all I could fit into the frame while still including the whole Surface surface).

In more prosaic developments, but no less important ones, Surface is now supported by Microsoft Update — and from my talk with them, it seemed like this is just one of many steps they’re taking to really tie in the Surface to other Windows and Microsoft services and APIs. For instance, they’re working hard to make XNA play well with Surface, and it sounds like the Surface team is going to be instrumental in establishing a set of standardized gestures and motion controls for Surface, Windows 7, and Windows Mobile 7. That’s pretty key, and the Surface team has done a huge amount of research into touch and gesture usability, so they’re the right guys for the job. WPF controls and libraries are also being integrated, so more traditional interfaces can be easily adapted to not be immediately broken by being clicked on in 20 different places at once.

Their little 128-bit identifier tags (we saw those in our behind the scenes look) are being rolled out in earnest, so developers will be able to work those into their apps. I was just thinking how awesome it would be to eat on a Surface and just put down a little picture of the drink you want right there on the table — bam, hit “confirm” or whatever and it’s on the way. They’re also optimizing background processes for better notification ability while in other apps and that sort of thing.

I liked the stress test that helps make sure apps won’t just freak out when there are (for example) chimps pounding on the table all over the place. When they ran it for me in the video above, it managed to exit the app, go shopping, and start ordering Dungeon Siege II before they stopped it. Not bad taste for 20 virtual monkeys. I suppose it would have only stopped when they asked for a card number.

All these improvements and more are being demonstrated in more detail at Tech-Ed, pretty much while you’re reading this article, so if you’re a Surface developer (and not at the sessions — come on), you’ll get a lot more details soon. For the rest of you, though, I thought it might be nice for you to know that the Surface wasn’t just a one night stand for Microsoft; it’s growing up into a real product and they’re actually putting a lot of weight behind it. In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted on all Surface and Surface-related news.

Ladies and germs, behold the wonders of what’s to come. Someday we will live in a world that is filled with Microsoft Surface-like devices and everything will blend seamlessly together. Our notebooks will become manufacturing facilities and scanners. Shopkeeper’ countertops will be large touchscreens and our desks will be virtual desks. The future, according to Microsoft, will be grand and wonderful.

Watch the two videos after the jump about Microsoft’s vision of XUI – experience user interfaces – to experience the future too.

i started something via slashgear

What they didn’t say was exactly what size the touchscreen will be.

[via WSJ]

Who would have thought that one of the coolest things we’ve seen at CES would be hidden in a 10×10 booth at the very back of the South Hall? Like a diamond in the rough, there sat the PQ Labs iTablet.

They’ve essentially taken the idea behind the Microsoft Surface and have done it better in every way. It’s cheaper, it’s gorgeous, and perhaps most notably, it’s not a hulking monster.

Two of the most notable features of the Surface are its multitouch capabilities and the availability of a development SDK, both of which PQ Labs has matched (or, in the case of the SDK, plan to match soon). The number of fingers detected by the multitouch sensor is limited only by the individual software designer’s desire – the hardware itself supports as many simultaneous prods as you can throw at it.

Contrary to its iCliche name, the iTable runs Windows XP rather than on OS X or some proprietary system. The last bit is good news for developers – if you’ve already got an app ready to go, you don’t need to rewrite it from scratch for compatibility. Just call in the proper APIs for mapping input, and you’re good to go. They’re pitching this pretty hard as a “big iPhone” (hence the name) – it’s probably not the best way to market it (as it’s not, you know, a cellphone), but it really does feel similar to the iPhone; the feel of the glass, the way multitouch behaves, it’s all very similar.

The iTable product comes in a variety of flavors, depending how complete of a system you’re looking for. The cheapest way to get in on the fun is the Multi-Touch G², a 32″ LCD overlay that goes for $2,399. Beyond that is where the “Table” part of the “iTable” name comes in – a few grand more (the $5000-$7000 was thrown around in conversation) nets you a table with the sensors incorporated into the display, and roughly $10,000 gets you the aforementioned table with a beast of a computer pre-configured ready to go. It may seem pricey, but with the 30″ surface going for $12,500, it’s relatively cheap.

The company is a recent startup, so they don’t quite have the resources to throw around that Microsoft does. As such, they operating without a warehouse, so these things are being built per order and they’re currently only selling units to businesses. You know, PQ Labs, CrunchGear is a business – hook it up!

Multi-touch and general touchscreen tech is the new tech Wild West, it seems, and like the Lotto, many will enter, only a few will win. Still, competition in this area is essential for innovation; every lackluster touchscreen phone that comes out gets immediately buried because the iPhone had already taken it to the next level. Same with the Surface, but that doesn’t mean either of those products are guaranteed against usurpation.

If you’re interested, head down to Florida on the 18th for the International Association for Amusement Parks and Attractions expo and check the thing out. (giggle)

MS also mentions the hand-in-hand aspect of Surface and Windows 7, which is supposed to multitouch it up in a couple years here. Makes sense; I know a lot was learned about touch interface design (Windows and otherwise) from working on the Surface.

Remember that Election 08 iPhone app I wrote up a couple days ago? Looks like Microsoft Research has been thinking along the same lines and in honor of the voting season has unleashed some election-orientated applications for the Surface. And because of the “M” in “MSNBC,” they got a pretty extensive little segment, seen above, demonstrating some of the little widgets they’ve put together.

As usual with Surface stuff, it’s pretty underwhelming to watch, but actually interacting with these things is always fun. I can only imagine the arguments people are going to have over these things in hotel lobbies across the nation. Me? I’m a Cascadian Separatist.

Conceptual products are fun. There’s no denying that. Everybody wants to see a car that looks like a jet, spaceship or rocket. Just the problem is, more often than not, the concept car does not exist in real life.

A recent article by Kontra alleges that concept products are actually bad for the company, citing the success of Apple as evidence. Apple internalizes all of its concepts, even going so far as tearing down the prototype of their first retail store before unleashing them on the public. With real-world parameters and a drive to market as the main focus, designers and engineers are forced to produce results that will sell.

Microsoft externalizes at least some of its concept products. Surface, and now Sphere are two examples where concepts have been introduced to the public above and beyond the needs and means of most people. At least for now. A more pure example of Microsoft’s conceptual wanderings might be their all digital concept homes and kitchens.

On the one hand, concepts help stabilize a company as whole with real world presence. People see the innovations that are coming creating not only brand awareness, but also brand association. On the other hand, concepts can drain the focus from a company, creating lofty ambitions that have no real-world chance of ever coming to market.

In the end what really matters is innovation. Both Apple and Microsoft are successful companies by any measure. I certainly like seeing innovation on display and think – like anything else – moderation is key.

It’s free to use and of course free to look, so stop by a lobby tomorrow on your lunch break and give the thing a touch. If you haven’t seen enough video of the thing yet, here’s some Microsoft marketing for you.

Update: Click below to see if your city is included in the rollout. (it’s kinda limited)

Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers (3 units)

Sheraton Boston Hotel (2 units)

Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers (3 units)

Sheraton Seattle (3 units)

Sheraton Gateway San Francisco Hotel Airport (2 units)

When I got to play around with the Surface back in June, I was excited about the possibilities of other shapes and applications, but Microsoft responded to questions on that front as they responded to almost every question: “There are many possibilities and we’re looking into things” or some analogue thereof.

Well, they’re letting one shape out of the bag this week, the totally expected spheroid version of the Surface and our local journalists have dirtied it up with their little paws (and taken video). To be honest, it doesn’t appear that different from the flat surface, although the fundamental change from a limited shape to a continuous one is something I’m sure the designers are excited about. They take interface design very seriously and seemed very good at it as well, so maybe I’ll be as impressed by the sphere Surface as I was by the flat one — as soon as I get my hands on it.

Check out this video from Digital World Tokyo, for the Digital Wall in action.

First, we saw a really nice photo app that’s going to be shipping with the units. It’s actually not that hard to set up, apparently — we had a developer show us how to throw together a pretty complex photo-and-tag-viewing program for the Surface in just a few minutes. The SDK is pumped up with all kinds of shortcuts and things that allow developers to take advantage of, say, the ability to slide an object around and have it stop based on friction or what objects it hits. This is great for the photo app, where you can move photos in and out of a little bubble or bar and toss them back in easily. Sorting and stacking the pictures felt very natural, like just sorting your usual 3×5s, except in this case some were videos, some you could expand to enormous size, and you could organize them automatically by metadata, category, and so on.

Next we saw probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Essentially a geotagged photos viewing application, it had Virtual Earth (very fun to play with, as I did without permission for a bit) and spread across the world were little photos. The photos were placed on the map exactly where they were taken and they could be selected by hand gestures, or filtered by other means so that only, say, panoramic photos taken in 2007 would show up. I know I have a lot of those. Geotagging has always been kind of “meh” for me, but this made it accessible, purposeful, and entertaining. And it was something a developer had been working on in his spare time.

They then took us down to the labs, where we got to see how they stress-test these mothers. After all, there are so many freaky combinations of touches, drags, and rotations that when combined with all the stuff they’re trying to make instantly accessible, bugs are certain to crop up. So since they can’t have 1,000 monkeys tapping on 100 units until they’ve exhausted every possiblity, they use an emulator to simulate multiple fingertips; it looks pretty freaky having all these ghost touches working over their demo environment.

They also have a robotic arm named Petey. It’s kind of like a soft little jackhammer that has a bunch of preset tests that they can run to check whether a configuration is up to date — drag latency and that sort of thing. It was fun to watch in action, although to be honest I was kind of hoping for something more android-y, with fingertips and everything. I get the feeling the people involved really want to make this thing exactly like their vision and are willing to go to kind of ridiculous lengths to make sure it’s not going to crap out on some grandma and ruin her night.

The developer we talked to built this app that, using pretty simple coding and in just a couple minutes, would read the tag on the back of this physical picture, fetch the metadata from the flickr account it was from originally, and display it all side by side with the other tagged, categorized pictures that were in fact not physically real. Seriously people, this was like some science fiction tech here but it’s real and it actually works very well.

One of the last things they showed us were some research facilities where they test out the Surface on unsuspecting Microserfs. They record a ton of information from each testing session and it’s displayed thusly:

That was more or less the end of the ride. It’s hard to tell from the pictures (and even in video it’s hard to see just how dynamic these applications are and how well they work), but this technology is really impressive. I’m a little disappointed that it’s mainly going to be doing grunt work like hotel concierge stuff and parlor tricks until it really gets a big roll-out, but I firmly believe that once a few people get their hands on these things, they’re going to want them everywhere. I asked about seeing more of their little games and pet projects but we were out of time. They’re running down lots of possibilities, they said, but for now they actually need to put out a product so they can continue to make these things better and better. I’ll link you all to some video as soon as the other guys I was with get it live.

More Surface stuff here if you’re interested.

So, what I’ve learned so far:
There have been about 7 versions of the Surface so far. They’ve had two development paths: one as a proof-of-concept to make the money flow to the project, and one “real” version with significantly different hardware. The main design problem has been that they need empty space for the light to travel through uninterrupted, both to and from the touchscreen. Originally, their design (as you can see in the pictures) involved a single camera set up with a mirror, which worked well enough to impress the exploratory committee or whatever, but was not nearly good enough for the public. So they moved to their alternative, an array of five cameras. They’re all IR, of course – and the engineer kept mentioning “uncommon manufacturing techniques” and said they were actually in on the parts at the ground floor.

The material of the screen is a lot like a rear-projection TV – it’s essentially precision frosted glass, and they had to tweak it for the surface — they were evasive on just how. The projected image has to be bright to your eye, requiring frostiness, but also let the cameras have a clear picture of objects touching it, which requires transparency. Obviously they’ve found a good middle ground.

I have to be honest that I was a little disappointed when I learned that it doesn’t really recognize objects for what they are magically — phones, paintbrushes, cameras, and so on are not recognized by their shape, but they can be identified by special tags attached to the bottom as you see in the picture. These tags can be simple or complex depending on how specific you need them to be (just a dial? or an individual’s unique ID?) Of course, it would be pretty impossible to just recognize a phone’s model and everything just from its shape, but it would be cool.

There have just been a couple interesting but extremely meta presentations on the inspiration behind the UI and what they’re going for. They’ve tested it out on kids and grandmas and I think they’ve listened to the feedback. I’ve talked with a lot of the people on the team now and they really like what they’re doing and one of the things they all say is that the ideas for applications, games, and all that kind of thing just flow naturally from everyone who gets near the thing. It’s so intuitive, so fun, and it works so well that people instantly have a brainwave one way or the other. They’ve had issues making the UI work well because there’s a lot of interference from the GUI mindset. Users aren’t sure whether to leave Windows behind entirely or bring it with them, so it has to be determined by the designers beyond question. They’ve done a great job with that.

If you haven’t gotten your hands on one of these things yet, do so as soon as you can. The team and I agree that it’s an experiential thing. Once you sit down with it for a minute, there’s an instant explosion in your brain and you see all the possibilities, especially when you see what they’ve already done with it. Their mega-high-res photo zooming app, Seadragon, was extremely impressive and it’s pretty much just a tech demo. More on the way.

Heh. This very pretty presenter (yes, we’re very professional here at CG) set up fly-on-the-wall cameras to watch how people with no previous experience with the thing interact with it and go through the discovery process. These people are going nuts, I wish I had video of it. This one lady is acting like a 3-year-old, it’s hilarious. It’s really that fun. They figure it out really fast and while they’re kind of mystified by what exactly this thing is, but they become experts right away. Some old guy is deciding he’s going to teach people how to make things happen. A little kid is navigating the system like she’s an old hand at it. The social aspect is new to them and everyone reacts differently (which side do they go to? how many people can touch it at once?). Fortunately, they’re being secretly recorded so all the feedback makes it to the dev team.

I didn’t have my video camera with me, but SlashGear did. I promised I’d link. This is a renegade post.

Microsoft Surface debuted at Harrah’s in Las Vegas yesterday. The tables come with several programs that make throwing your money away all the more enjoyable. One such program, called Mixologists, lets gamblers create their own drink, which then presumably sends the order out to the bar. There’s also one to watch YouTube videos (oh, great), and one that lets people chat and flirt and so on. Gambling brings people together.

The casino rollout is one of the first commercial uses of Surface; AT&T rolled them out a few weeks ago in its stores.

The $10,000 table is still a little while away from mass consumer adoption. Ask Santa for one in a few years.

via Drudge Report

Microsoft seems to think the future of the computer doesn’t lie in traditional keyboards but in gesture-based controls, such as those used on the iPhone and its own Surface device. And the next version of Windows, for now just called Windows 7 or Vienna, will have much touchscreen and gesture support built in.

While we’re still a few years away from all having Surfaces in our homes, Microsoft recently showed off a new, cheaper application of gesture control that could be integrated into monitors or laptops fairly easily. Is this what Microsoft wants to do? You bet. Microsoft knows that gesture-based input is hot, as iPhone’s popularity shows, and the surface and touch wall devices, when coupled with Windows 7, could change the way we use computers. If it works.

AT&T is rolling out Microsoft’s Surface today. There are no new features other than what we saw at CTIA a few weeks back. It’s ‘live’ now, but nothing ground breaking. I was disappointed because I wanted to be able to transfer data from a T-Mobile device to my iPhone. But that’s not an available feature just yet. I also wasn’t able to plop down my Samsung Blackjack II, but was denied. The only devices that will register on the Surface are the ones that are connected to the display. Sort of a disappointment. Oh well.

Check out the video if you don’t live in one of the following four cities.

New York City
381 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10017

350 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10022

Atlanta
3429 Lenox Road NE
Atlanta, GA 30326

San Antonio
13127 San Pedro Ave.
San Antonio, TX 78216

San Francisco
1206 El Camino Real
San Bruno, CA 94066

This video is unedited, so my apologies for the inclusion of any unwanted extra footage, but I wanted to get it up ASAP.

Earlier this year at CES I got to spend some time with Microsoft’s Surface device, and I was impressed by what they’re doing. I’ll admit I went in with the attitude of “oh, touchscreen table, big deal”, but it’s far, far more than that.

Earlier today we brought you news that Surface was going to start appearing in AT&T stores, perhaps as customer service kiosks, and now we have a date: April 17. That’s rather soon.

If you haven’t had a chance to check Surface out yet, make a stop in to your local store. It’s worth it.