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Microsoft Launches Multitouch Surface Computing

Well. That's a fun product! What kind of software is it running? I guess not windows vista.. :D In my opinion, now this product is useless for home user. Why? I tell you why. What can you do with it? Transfer your photos thru wireless? Cool, but under 5 - 10k$? No way... I looked the demonstration and it looked like old people playing. I now it looks nice and etc, but how long you gonna play with your photos? 1 week, 1 month, when you show it to your friends, and thats it. 5k or 10k isint worth it..

I dont have any bad feelings to M$ for this product. It's nice, fun, but they bought that technology. I respect Jeff Han.

But is it really useful? No for home user, but for tourist would be cool. Apple made smarter decision and made an iPhone, witch can have anybody with the same and way more features! :)
 
Wow...I'd like to take photos like that too. If I ever put my camera on top of one of those without some serious deleting I'd have about 200+ photos spilling out on the table...loads of fun in fiddling with that.

It looks cool, but unnecessary. I can't really imagine any real use for it yet. That said, I was still wowed by the demonstration...before I started thinking of any practical use that would work better than a real computer.

Cheers to MS for pushing on though, leaving any innovation arguments aside, since in the end it'll result in better stuff for us consumers.
 
It's very cool and I would by it, but they act as if they thought of it themselves even though you can clearly see that this the Jeff Han project...that's really lame of them.
 
sopp said:
Well. That's a fun product! What kind of software is it running? I guess not windows vista
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It's Vista.

In my opinion, now this product is useless for home user.
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it's not aimed at home-users at the moment.

Why? I tell you why. What can you do with it? Transfer your photos thru wireless? Cool, but under 5 - 10k$? No way... I looked the demonstration and it looked like old people playing. I now it looks nice and etc, but how long you gonna play with your photos? 1 week, 1 month, when you show it to your friends, and thats it. 5k or 10k isint worth it..
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you need to look at the big picture. When I saw the demos, I immediately thought "playing games like Europa Universalis or Civ IV on that thing would absolutely kick ass....". And it could be a shared experience, instead of current thing, with one guy in front of a monitor. And that's just one possible use.

I dont have any bad feelings to M$ for this product. It's nice, fun, but they bought that technology. I respect Jeff Han.
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What makes you think that? Did Apple buy their tech from Han? No they did not. So what makes you think that MS bought theirs?

But is it really useful? No for home user
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Again, look at the big picture. You are looking, but you are not seeing.
 
i know this is jeff hans technologyreally, but didnt apple say that put like a billion patents on the multi touch - if they did, surely this infringes atleast some of those patents?

also, microsoft say this is something new, but i remember seeing a "home of the future" by microsoft sponsored by Orange, that included their brand new object recognition, and that was like 7 years ago...thats a long time in development.

plus i hope with the credit card payments they are doing in the restaurants they have some amazing way to keep privacy of typing your pin, i wouldnt want to type my pin on a table that everyone is using..
 
It appears that the majority of the technology in this new device is already available. I thought most of it now was patented by :apple: so MSFT can't use it? :) :D
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hmmm thinking about it tho, apple said first we made the GUI, then a mouse, and now multitouch. could you really patent a mouse or just the idea of a gui?!
 
yagran said:
i know this is jeff hans technologyreally, but didnt apple say that put like a billion patents on the multi touch - if they did, surely this infringes atleast some of those patents?
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Not necessarily, there are several ways to implement this.
 
Think of how the application of this sort of technology can change such areas as:

Air traffic, road, train and ship control,
Power management systems (electricity / water generation and distribution)
NASA,
Hospitals
Education - where any number of kids can tocuh/use a screen simultaneously
Warehousing and inventory management
CRM
Insurance claims processing
Banking
Travel and accommodation - searching and booking
MySpace
SecondLife
Meeting rooms
Conferences and presentations - which is really just education in another guise

I am sure I could go on ...

The key is - this sort of technology is only an enabler to doing things in a different way.

***** ! I use to calculate bombing runs for our Squadron in the RAAF using an HP65 calculator - how far behind the times is that sort of technology today? And we thought, then, that we were ahead of the game.

The next few years are going to be very exciting ...
 
kingofkolt said:
GUYS THE APPLE STORE IS DOWN!!! I wonder if they'll have new MBP's tomorrow?!

Just kidding.

But seriously, I wonder how multi-touch will affect gaming..? I'm not sure how gameplay in a first-person shooter game would be enhanced by multi-touch. I play Battlefield 2 a ton, and I can't really think of a way to make it better with multi-touch. I suppose I could be looking through a scope, then place my two fingers on the screen and stretch them apart and that would zoom in...? Or not... Ideas?
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Well imagine you have a fire button zone that you tap with one hand and point with the other. That would rock hard. You could use a kind of lock-on by double tapping on a enemy. The possibilities are endless.

I like.

Oh and yeah, I wish the MBP would hurry up.
 
Sonic said:
Well imagine you have a fire button zone that you tap with one hand and point with the other. That would rock hard. You could use a kind of lock-on by double tapping on a enemy. The possibilities are endless.

I like.

Oh and yeah, I wish the MBP would hurry up.
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ur telling me youve never plugged in a touch screen to an fps!?

pfft makes you amazing in counter strike source, you just touch peoples heads lol. then you get called a H4X0r and get banned tho...sigh
 
in january apple declared it was going to be 'a great year for the mac'.....

next weeks WWDC will be 5 months since that statement....its time to come up with that 'great' bit now stevie boy...

microsoft should be credited with double standards here, iPhone was a totally useless object for business users purely coz they didnt invent it...and now they release a before seen technology which they claim has never been seen before, in a product that will certainly not change the way your average guy downloads his music to his phone after a hard days work on a building site, a feat he is chuffed to bits about coz he only just figured out how to do it right......oh, and at a mere consumer price of 10K.

the touch screen era is upon us, but its not going to be in the shape of microsofts vision, prices or reality.

if apple can get this technology to the design and professional users at the same price points that they are used to paying, they will crack it, and in turn allow this technology to find its right place....coz at the moment i see no real world use for this in a home as a table.
 
Very cool....big step in a new directions for computer, the only problem is is 5-10k! Not going to be replacing the house hold computer any time soon.



Also shipping in Winter '07 isn't great but whatever
 
Well the multitouch war has been started. MS just fired the first salvo against the first device iPhone.

This may become an interesting year after all.
 
Put down the hater-ade.

Forgive me for not reading the whole thread, but... I just wanted to add my support to those who have pointed out the unecessary cynicism and pointless MS bashing in this thread. I love Apple as much as anyone, but you have to hand it to the boys and girls at MS: this is a very cool product, and they know exactly who to sell it to. There's been a lot of criticism based on some pretty weak points.

1) It's too expensive for the mass market, the implication being that because it's expensive, no one will care.

My response: The iPod was really expensive when it came out, too. The iPhone will be as well. Call me crazy but a 5,000 dollar coffee table (that is also a touch screen computer) is in no way less practical than a 600 dollar mobile phone (that is also a touch screen computer.) Both are prohibitively expensive for 95% of the population of America, which is one of the richest countries in the world. (I made that statistic up, but you get the point.) The iPhone isn't for the mass market. It's for early adopters and people with money to play with. When the price comes down, it'll be different. "Surface" isn't for the mass market either. It's for hotels, businesses, and that kind of thing. When the price comes down, it'll be different. Are we sensing a pattern here? :)
(Note: prohibitively expensive doesn't mean that someone doesn't have the money, it means they won't spend that kind of money on a phone or table when they could spend 100 bucks instead.)


2) This isn't that great because MS didn't invent this technology, they just got it from someone else and made a table out of it.

My response: And Apple didn't invent multi-touch any more than MS did. They got it from someone else and made a phone out of it. Explain to me how making a multi-touch phone is really that much more innovative than making a multi-touch table, or couch, or TV, or refridgerator, or whatever. Yes, it's SMALLER, which is harder to engineer, but it's not necessarily more INNOVATIVE. Now putting an entire music library in someone's pocket, that's innovative. But I digress...

Really, the table is just different. Remember when we were all being advised to "think different"? Unfortunately, knee-jerk MS bashing as a response to a cool new tech thingie makes the entire community of Mac users, as a whole, look more and more like those dusty, mindless automatons in that famous "1984" Mac commercial. This is speaking as a Mac user here. Come on guys. The pattern of thinking here is that everything M$ does is *****ty. Let's think different. This computer table might be every bit as good as that computer phone. By the way, did you read/see the bit about putting a camera down on the surface and the pictures spill out!? That's RAD! I wouldn't care if Black & Decker made this thing, I'd still want one!
 
Touchsurfaces like that could be seen in the movie "The Island" (http://farm.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/) - the whole Movie was like a massive Microsoft and MSN propagande with MSN Searchengines in phone boots instead of yellow pages and huge MSN ads everywhere on the buildings.
I bet they had this in development back then. I think it rocks from what you can see on the videos. Even though it appears to react a little slow.

I bet Steve was getting mad in his office when he saw what MS announced today. The seemless wireless integration of things.

In 5 - 10 years in our living rooms. By that time Apple will have a solution as well I think ;-)
 
Phormic said:
Really? I can see no mention of that on the Microsoft website. I would have thought that Microsoft would be screaming out that fact at the top of their lungs were it true.
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From the factsheet in their website:

The custom software platform runs on Windows Vista and has wired Ethernet 10/100 and wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity.
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Um, that awesome. Sorry but this is the future of computing. I have been wondering what the future computer would be like. Can't use a mouse and keyboard forever. See any mice on star trek or Star wars???? Nope. Worst thing is microsoft has it first.

Funny thing though. I could SWEAR I saw a demo for this a while back and it was apple who had it. That is not a joke.
 
MS has provided a interesting device for its first multitouch product.

Apple, on the other hand is pushing this tech from a mobile device first.

Personally, I find that Apple's strategy will scale better. Ether way, welcome to the new paradigm.
 
Had Apple demonstrated this, the thread would be 38 pages long with drooling fans talking about how this will change the world.

A bit earlier, someone (sorry, too lazy to go back and look) pointed out several business uses for this. This is not a consumer product people, get over the price tag. As with all technology, the price will fall over time and it might just be affordable for the home. If Apple can bring this technology to the home, more power to them. The fact that Microsoft demonstrated it for a table-like computer and Apple will be releasing the iPhone, the race is on to get it to the desktop. Should be a fun one to watch.

OK, back to your Microsoft bashing. :rolleyes:
 
Liquidog said:
<snip>

Really, the table is just different. Remember when we were all being advised to "think different"? Unfortunately, knee-jerk MS bashing as a response to a cool new tech thingie makes the entire community of Mac users, as a whole, look more and more like those dusty, mindless automatons in that famous "1984" Mac commercial. This is speaking as a Mac user here. Come on guys. The pattern of thinking here is that everything M$ does is *****ty. Let's think different. ...
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good post!

I'm a fairly loyal apple person myself but I'm not so snowed by it all that I can't appreciate something else as well. It happens a lot here though, the apple can do no wrong mentality. <sigh>




That thing is very cool. If I could afford it, I'd buy it. Microsoft or not. :p :)
 
Well said Liquidog.

Multi touch is so friggin cool, along with digital paper. Imagine the two combined.

I bet Wacom are kicking themselves for not patenting this first.

It would be nice to see is an agreement by the people who hold these patents that these concepts can be used anywhere by anyone.

http://bla.st/mac/
 
failsafe1 said:
Interesting concept. But now I have to stay in my living room simply working with photos and such? Will it ever see a mainstream use? We will see. Always like seeing new ideas. So that is a good thing.
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Good point and here's an examination of both companies products. Microsoft releases amazing tech but only in the price range for companies, corporations, etc... Apple releases a product that virtually anyone with a job can buy. Same foundational technology, two different audiences.

Imagine yourself seeing this from Microsoft and saying, "I SOOOO want this! ... $10,000? ... Oh, never mind then." From Apple, "I SOOOO want this! ... $500? Okay, I'll have to save up a little cash, but okay." Totally different markets in my opinion.
 
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