New top-secret 'Surface' will change the way we look at computing
In the next year, Bill Gates will manage one
of the highest-profile transitions in American business history — he’ll
leave his day job as Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft, the $300
billion company he co-founded 32 years ago, and will move full time
into philanthropy. But
before he leaves, Gates has a few more high-tech projects to finish.
Until this morning, one project — almost five years in the making and
code-named 'Milan,’ — was top-secret.
In a TODAY exclusive, I had a chance to talk with Gates at Microsoft’s
Redmond, Washington campus about a revolutionary new device Microsoft
now calls “Surface.”“Pretty exciting, eh?” Gates said with a sly
smile, when he put his hand down on what looked initially like a low,
black coffee table: At the touch of his hand, the hard, plastic
tabletop suddenly dissolved into what looked like tiny ripples of
water. The ‘water’ responded to each of his fingers and the ripples
rushed quickly away in every direction.“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.” When I placed my hand on the table at the same time, there were more ripples.It
took a moment to appreciate what was happening. Every hand motion Gates
or I did was met with an immediate response from the table. There was
no keyboard. There was no mouse. Just our gestures.“All
you have to do is reach out and touch the Surface,” Gates told me with
barely concealed pride. “And it responds to what you do.” In
an industry whose bold pronouncements about the future has taught me
the benefits of skepticism, Surface literally took my breath away. If
the Surface project rollout goes as planned in November, it could alter
the way everyday Americans control the technology that currently
overwhelms many of us. After
Gates and I spent about 20 minutes taking the device out for a spin, a
lot of my preconceived notions about how people interact with computers
began to melt away.How it works
The
radical new approach starts with the guts of the device itself. Under
the impact-resistant plastic top skin on an otherwise nondescript table
hide five infrared scanners, a projector, and a wireless modem. The
scanners recognize objects and shapes placed on the top and respond to
them accordingly. For example, if the scanners recognize fingers, and
the fingers have been placed in color circles that appear on the
surface, the projector shows colored lines that follow the tracings and
movements of your fingers. Meanwhile, an internal modem sends and
receives signals from any electronic device placed on it. All of the
hardware is run by a special version of Microsoft’s new operating
system, Windows Vista. To
do things on Surface’s tabletop screen, you reach down, touch it and
push it. To make the image you see on the screen bigger, spread your
fingers. To make it smaller, squeeze your fingers together. To move
something into the trash, push it into the trash with your hand. And it
allows what Microsoft calls “Multi-Touch” and “Multi-User” interaction
— namely, more than one person can interact with it at a time. Try that
with your home computer. One
of the most revolutionary aspects of Surface, though, is its natural
interaction with everyday objects and technologies. When you place your
wi-fi enabled digital camera on the table, for example, Surface ‘sees’
the camera and does something extraordinary: It pulls your digital
pictures and videos out onto the table for you to look at, move, edit
or send. Images literally spill out in a pool of color.
The
whole thing is remarkably intuitive, says Gates, because it’s
remarkably similar to what people do in everyday life. “When you make
it so that it's just visual — touch and visual — you're drawing on what
humans are incredibly good at,” he said. “You know, what people have
been practicing their entire lives. People will start to see that this
world of information and entertainment is going to be far more
accessible.
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