Are You Feeling It?

Microsoft Surface, also known as Microsoft Tabletop, is an interactive tabletop computer. There is no mouse and no keyboard. It is the surface that feels you.

The tabletop features four main interface components:

Direct interaction: Facility to manage digital information with hand gestures and touch instead on mouse and keyboard.

Multi-touch contact: User need not use only one finger to manage digital data. If user dips five fingers in five different colors in the on screen paint palette and draws five lines with five fingers, you get five lines with five colors.

Multi-user experience: Typical computers accept only one keyboard and a mouse. Microsoft Surface accepts multiple inputs from multiple users. More than one person sitting across the Surface, can do independent work on the same Surface.

Object recognition: The system can identify physical objects placed on the Surface. It can relate the appropriate software for the appropriate item placed on surface. Objects may be recognized based on their shape or on special codes (like barcodes) affixed to them.

While viewing the short promotional video, I kept asking myself, "Is this for real?" My second thought was, "Gosh, these must be a pain to keep clean. Imagine all of those fingerprints..." We have a touch screen computer at work, and it is impossible to keep the screen oil-free. There are always fingerprint smudges. But at the same time, I can't help but marvel at the digital advancements.

The following video clip parodies the Microsoft Surface.

I had to smile. I'm not sure that I am willing to blow $10,000 on a technological coffee table. I know for a fact that I don't have that kind of money laying around. But the breakthroughs that Microsoft is making are filled with possibilities, and I can see this kind of technology catching on in business corporations, as well as restaurants. So yeah, take that Apple.