Hands on With MS Surface

A loyal reader of this blog sent me a link to Surface in Boston This Week and gave me an assignment to go and see it. I did yesterday and watched a demo and got to play with it a little.



Yes that's me. The paint program only worked if you touched the surface rather hard. Waving or a light touch didn't register at all. In the demo of water covering some stones (which is very cool) you can just wave your hand over the screen to impact the water. The faster you wave, the faster the ripples. Touching also works. I got the sense these differences were just how the apps were tuned.

So the demo was a machine with one MS person seated on one side and about 6 of us standing around the other side. Shortly after we got there I realized one of the other people around the machine was Dan Bricklin inventor of the spreadsheet with Visicalc. I recognized him from some other events I'd seen him at. Others didn't know who he was and I laughed when I heard an MS person ask him if he was "in tech". Dan's a faster blogger than I am and wrote about the demo. He even uploaded within a few hours some videos I didn't realized he took. In video number one you can see me in the black jacket on the left with my friend Mike in a cap to my left. The video of me playing with the paint app above is Dan's video number two.

He met with MS for 30 minutes the day before and posted a video of that interview that shows the experience very well. At about 6 mins in they describe the device. It's a regular windows computer with a DLP and 5 infrared cameras. The table top is a diffuser, so only close things are "seen". At about 27 mins in there's a nice demo of an in store system showing more info about cell phones for sale. I expect there's more at the MS Surface site, but it didn't load in Safari. The thing to note is that surface is based on this optical system and will never be a handheld device. It won't compete with an iPhone. I suspect Apple could scale up their touch screen technology, though I doubt it they could ever make it study enough for Surface's market of public lobbies, casinos and stores.

The music app was similar to an iPhone's coverflow, except with the larger screen they could show 3 rows of album covers. You click on the corner of the cover to "turn it around" to see the list of songs on the album, also similar to an iPhone. With the greater screen real estate you pick a song by dragging it to the semi-circle on the side of the screen representing the playlist. That's very nice and you can use two fingers (or two people with two hands) to drag multiple songs to the playlist at the same time.

I'm not sure I saw anything really amazingly more useful than a normal computer. The dining app allowing you to order and pay and divide the bill is very nice. Such things could be done via other systems. Today at (at say LTK) they bring a device to your table allowing you to swipe your own credit card, add a tip, get a receipt and complete the transaction. A screen could show images and allow dragging and dropping just like the surface demo. The cell phone info app in Dan's video could work today with a computer with a mouse, but people don't make them that pretty. Yes the touch interface is slicker but it got me thinking I'd like to see more visual-based interfaces on regular computers. Their photo app has a popup menu to allow e.g., emailing the photo, I'd much prefer an outbox on the side of the screen letting you drag to the image (or several images) to it, like the music app allowed adding a song to the playlist.

According to MS, Surface may not roll out for 3-5 years, that's a long time. At $5,000 a pop I suspect it will be much longer before you start routinely running into these. I like the innovation and I suspect MS and Apple will argue over intellectual property. Dan is already thinking about how to get standard gestures in these UIs across venders. I'll note I was surprised that mouse gestures in Opera and Firefox were the same and that FPS controls standardized. Maybe it will "just happen" but that seems like a big if.

FYI, the Sherridan Hotel in Boston is part of the Prudential parking system. I paid $24 to park for less than 2 hours. Bleech.