Microsoft commerciallized Andy Wilsons Touchlight in combination with something Reactable-like. And they simply called it Surface…
They too seemed to have problems with finding cool applications, putting your credit card on the screen to pay is quite funny, hopefully we will have to wait some years until there will be RFID-Money…
Hopefully there will be SDKs soon. Well, I think that’s been it for my project and Touchlib. But it’s Microsoft. They won’t do a linux version, so there is still some potential left.
chrustinho said on June 1st, 2007 at 17:10:
ah, the first thing from MS for a long time that could be really cool. For sure they only got it, because they bought the inventor, but hey that’s the business, so does Apple (Xerox had the really admirable guys long time ago). So, it’s not new but it’s cool.
I don’t think that’s been it for your project. It is more or less a chance. First you probably can get really good hardware and second, because the original hardware from mircrosoft will be very expensive lot of people will want to build their own one. They will surely be not satisfied with a creepy SDK from MIcrosoft but want to use free software.
I wonder how scalable such a surface is. Small tables are nice but really big ones for conferences would be amazing.
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Hm, werde ich mich jetzt immer abmühen meinen Senf auf Englisch zu verfassen, nur damit das Gesamtbild nicht gestört wird? :-)
pascal said on June 8th, 2007 at 22:48:
Musst natürlich nicht alles auf Englisch schreiben, Französisch geht auch.
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This time, Microsoft did *not* buy the inventor, it’s their very own guy of Microsoft Research. (They do cool stuff there, btw. Sometimes it even ends in some kind of product…)