Looks like they're trying to bring back the ghost of the original Surface (not the tablet one). I developed for the original Surface and SUR-40 while in grad school - in fact, my master's thesis was about certain forms of interactions enabled on tabletop computers.<p>The first surface was a cool product, which I still believe was just too early (poor technology: needed a high DPI screen, sluggish processor, etc; terrible software, high price tag, smartphones and tablets were not what they are now so the idea of hub was limited). The SUR-40 was a disaster (the screen would <i>bend</i> when you touched it, ffs).<p>There's something powerful in hub computers, but not in the TV form. The tabletop form was right all along - collaborating around a table enables kinds of interactions that are not possible on a white board (notably by using physical objects in conjunction with the tabletop). The SUR-40 had the ambition of being usable both in whiteboard and table mode, but that's probably overdoing it. Interested to see where this goes, but the high price tag makes me doubtful. Make a $999 coffee table computer that every nerd can have in their living room to play boardgames, use to swap vacation photos/movies between phones and beam them up to the TV, collaborate on floorpans, etc. and you may have something.
I like that they're making it in the US and that they didn't just knee-jerk "OK, who are we having make it?"<p>Actually, I'm kind of liking a variety of things that MS has been doing lately. Heck, if I was going to start on mobile development I might actually start with the (much smaller) Windows ecosystem rather than trying to bubble to the top of the iOS or Android markets - the absolute number of users may be smaller, but if you do a good job the number that actually see and can purchase your app may be a lot higher than you'll see as you compete against 300 similar apps on the larger markets. Further, if MS keeps doing a decent job while Apple and Google work to find ways to irritate users and developers it may end up being an "in on the ground floor" type of option.
It's somewhat telling that Microsoft had to build their own captouch factory to produce sensing circuits of this size. Either Asian factories couldn't do it or, more likely, they <i>wouldn't</i> do it for the small quantity and massive BOM and scrap % involved at this size.
I really think something like this, if not this, is the future of engineering. Sometimes I think people underestimate the value of having a big space to "push around" various bits on and think things through. Having the resolution to be able to do that at scale means being able to walk up and have a high resolution photograph be literally 4" x 7" on an 84" diagonal screen would change everything.<p>Assuming 4K screens though, this is only 52PPI on the 84" model. And you would ideally want 200+ dpi. Not that anyone is going to make 84" 16K screens anytime soon (interestingly they are "possible" in that the manufacturing is known, but without an embedded data channel you would not be able to get data to them quickly enough.
It's nice to see this make the headlines, I was at Microsoft M&A group in 2012 when the acquisition became public. Satya has received a lot of praise for the direction Microsoft has been going in, but I still feel that some of the groundwork was laid by Steve. PPI is a good example with the acquisition becoming public in summer of 2012.<p>When most people today talk about Steve, they often make it sound like he was aloof to the needs of the industry, the fact that Microsoft needed to be re-organized, etc. I don't feel like he didn't know these things, but more-so that it took a change of leadership to rally the company with different goals. [edited to add more commentary]
<i>Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. "We have invented a new technology called multi-touch," he boasted, in one of the more reality-distorting things ever said during an Apple keynote. Han, by contrast, had been careful to share credit in his TED talk: "I'm not the only one doing it, there are a lot of people doing it."</i><p>I remember that. I had watched Mr Han's demo a while back BEFORE the iPhone announcement.
There are many exciting openings for creating augmented workspaces. But they are probably not around massive and massively expensive devices like this one (even if Microsoft has carried out some really good research along the way). IMHO, the focus should be on designing small and modular components that could be appropriated, recombined, and adapted to each concrete case.
Using wall as the display makes way more sense to me: <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-envisions-pc-as-projector-with-your-wall-as-the-display/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-envisions-pc-as-projector-wit...</a>
What i really, REALLY, would like to Know is what happened to the PixelSense Technology of the Sur40 Display.<p>You could put a document face-down on it and have a scan immediately available. How amazing would this be on a Surface Tablet, or Hub