project, now underway and scheduled to open in '09.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Coverage all round the web on this of course (though it's a pretty heavy
news time with announcements from all sorts at Where 2.0, Ingite and
D5).
Basically Surface is a touch-screen table, but with multi-touch ability.
You can not only drag stuff around but use two fingers or other tools to
perform other gestures(!), stretch images, write and draw etc. It
recognises things placed onto it and has proximity detection so you can,
for example, put a bluetooth phone or camera onto it and it will show
the photos on there. Video here:
http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/
Supposedly the table is around the $10,000 mark, and if we come up with
appropriate ideas for its use in the Capital City gallery it's surely a
reasonable figure. There's obviously a nice user generated content
possibility and in any case it's nice to get away from keyboards and
mice, but Sufrace seems to add quite a lot to the basic touch screen
functionality. I'm assuming Silverlight is the platform.
Can't really put an intelligent sustainability slant on it at the moment
beyond the obvious. But in short, it's every bit as cool for museums as
for hotels and phone shops!
