Microsoft Surface

After five years of keeping the project shrouded in secrecy, Microsoft today revealed its plans for Microsoft Surface, the first product in a category the company calls "surface computing." The technology, formerly code-named Milan, lets Microsoft turn a seemingly ordinary surface, such as a tabletop or a wall, into a computer. Introduced today at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, Microsoft Surface is a "multi-touch" tabletop computer that interacts with users through touch on multiple points on the screen.

The concept is simple: Users interact with the computer completely by touch, on a surface other than a standard screen. "It will feel like Minority Report," promises Pete Thompson, general manager of Microsoft's surface computing group. "Very futuristic--but it will be here this year."

The product unveiled today will be Microsoft branded and available to the company's four partners--Harrah's Entertainment, International Game Technologies, Starwood Hotels, and T-Mobile--in November. Starwood Hotels plans to put Microsoft Surface devices in common areas, to provide functions such as a virtual concierge; T-Mobile will use them to enhance the cell phone shopping experience. Microsoft expects to deploy dozens of units with each of its partners by year's end.
Microsoft Surface couples standard PC components with the cameras and projectors necessary to enable surface computing. The demo unit employed a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and an off-the-shelf graphics card with standard drivers (and Microsoft's own application layer to allow the GPU to help with sensing touch).

The images the PC outputs are displayed on the tabletop surface through a short-throw DLP projector contained inside the table; the lens is just 21 inches from the surface. The rear-projection system produces a 30-inch-diagonal, 4:3-aspect-ratio image at a resolution of 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz.

The table also houses a power supply, stereo speakers, an infrared illuminator, and five overlapping cameras that sense movement on its surface. The cameras feed images of objects on the surface--be they fingers or tagged objects such as game pieces, a Wi-Fi camera, or a digital audio player--back into the computer, where they're processed mostly in the GPU, according to Nigel Keam, one of Microsoft's architects behind Surface.

The specially treated surface's multi-touch capability has no implicit limit, says Keam. "We optimize it for 52 [points of touch], based on the most extreme reasonable scenario we could come up with: Four people with all fingers down, and 12 game pieces in the center."

One of the hardest things about working with the technology was to get the touch surface right. Developers had to walk a fine line in creating a surface that's opaque enough to hold a rear-projected image but translucent enough for cameras to see through it. "You need a strong diffuser on the topmost surface," Keam notes, "but the camera wants to see straight through the diffuser to what's on the surface. So it's a balancing act. We had to research a lot of different ways to make the surface look right, feel right, and be tough. Everything meets at this one layer."

The device's infrared capability means you can do more than just use your fingers on the tabletop surface. Tags on a Wi-Fi camera or a digital audio player, for example, could be used to transfer images, music, or playlists. Or perhaps a card could store your account information and let any Microsoft Surface unit grab your images from a central server. Tagged pieces might generate special effects for drawings or images, and puzzle pieces could act as props in interactive games.