Microsoft Surface

While working at the Curl booth at Web 2.0 Expo today I took a break and went over to see a demonstration of the Microsoft Surface device which was being given by Frances Calandra of Vectorform. It was, to put it mildly, impressive.

I always wondered what it would have been like to witness the "The Mother of all Demos" given by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. That was the Xerox Park demo that showed the world the very first incarnation of the mouse, GUI user interface, hyper-linking, and more. Did the people in the audience grasp the significance of that demo? By all accounts most of them did. The technologies introduced then changed the face of computing and brought the personal computer into existence (although it was another 12 years before that happened).

I feel as if I now have an inkling of what that experience must have been like. I've witnessed and interacted, first-hand, with Microsoft Surface and I've fallen in love with large multi-touchscreen devices. I don't know if this the future of human-computer interfaces but I know one thing: I can't stop thinking about it. Videos don't do this technology justice - it was an incredible experience using the Microsoft Surface device. I'm totally smitten. It may not be coming to your home anytime soon (see this hilarious parody), but I do see all kinds of commercial implementations for these large multi-touch devices.

It turns out, with a little research on the web, that the concept has been around since about the mid 1980's and there are other products that have the same potential as Microsoft Surface including a device and software by Perceptive Pixel and even an Linux version called Linux MPX. But from what I can tell Microsoft Surface is the only product that is commercially available. Perceptive Pixil's device is really cool, but it seems that their devices are custom developed for the Military and other one-off applications. MPX looks like its still in development and pretty rough. Microsoft Surface appears to be the best bet in the short run.

Could a person build a career developing applications for Microsoft Surface and other large multi-touch devices? I wonder. Right now Microsoft Surface is not available to the general public - you have to be a Microsoft partner to get one and Surface partners are far and few between. But one day they may become available to people like myself and when that happens I'm going to buy one and I'm going to teach myself how to program it and see what happens.