While i was attending CHI 2008 there was also a Microsoft booth, as premium sponsors of the conference.
No, the table was not there, but there was crew from the Surface team. Some talks, lot of listening and rumors around the corner, i had new insights on where is Surface heading.

A slimmer Surface
First, the form factor. Everyone wants a slimmer touch-enabled surface, it can be done with capacitive sensing (didn’t you know that it already exists from the french Stantum?) but renouncing some computer vision-related features, like the domino-tag recognition for object detection, that is now a core feature in the first AT&T installation.
Microsoft is really looking at retail, and retail is about things first, so they will not be going the capacivite way (even if they claim a capacitive Surface was already in development), and will stick with a vision-based setup trying to make it thinner.
How? Multi camera setups are the answer, but what about the display, will they switch to LCD or OLED? It will be an engineering challenge for sure, but they really want to move away from the crowd of fridge-shaped multitouch tables out there.

SDK and APIs
We asked for APIs and SDK availability, as researchers, and they were very interested: “yes, we really do want you scientists to play with the thing”.
Unfortunately for now the key concept is “business first”. A first wave of commercial partners, then hopefully the research labs.
They said Surface needs the contribute of the scientific community, as well as skilled user interface developers, so the question is not if they will release the SDK, but when.

IP and patents
Regarding IP and patents, they turned it down, “you cannot patent touching a table” even if someone else is trying to do that.
They said that there will be research papers about Surface internals, and they are deciding what to share and what to keep. So, and i always thought this way, the multi-touch world is more about who “does it right” with some clever algorithms/engineering rather than patenting the whole thing. That said, i think, there will be a lot of patents on underlying hw-related technology.

XBox into Surface!?
And here is the really interesting thing: XBox.
Yes, a possible future for Surface is being an extended XBox, in which you can plug both a normal lcd/plasma display (or projector) with usual gaming gear and also use the surface as as an additional control panel. Think about command and conquer games. This will happen when Surface will shift from commercial-oriented partners to end-user market, and is not behind the corner, but it’s a really feasible microsoft-style scenario, they love the gamers community and know they have the bucks and the potential to create the wave.

Hello world. This one to tell i am still alive, despite the lack of blog updates. I’m here at CHI 2008 in Florence, just started attending, have a poster to present for the MICC, an Engineering SIG to facilitate and, hopefully, some interesting things to get excited about in the world of Human Computer Interaction. If this is the case (whichi i am sure of), i will keep this post updated.

Give your sketches a kinetic feel
K-Sketch is a work presented by Colwell and Landay, it’s about creating a sketching user interface that speeds up the animation process. There is a lot on sketching, and these guys tell it’s for “novice” animators. My feel of it is that it is an awesome technique that could be in a pro tool too. Maybe multitouch?

Computational Textiles
For the soft and tangible interface lovers. Lilypad Arduino is about embedding technology in dresses, but not only that. Technology doesn’t look like that, dress does look like something more. And girls become passionate in programming and start computer science courses!

Get something more serious than a Wiimote
Had an interesting talk with Stephen Hughes, who was presenting his work with the U. of Glasgow on tactile input. He is actually the engineer founding SAHM-Engineering, that provides an integrated architecture of wireless sensors packed into a small box. That is very similar to what U. of Bologna does as the hardware platform fo TANGerINE, and a good sign that these micro-architectures are growing in market demand. Side our booth there was also Pamela Jennings with her project “Constructed Narratives”.
She is using tangibles with smart sensors too, to construct blocky “things” that map to conceptual structures, using WordNet as API and other text mining. Very different use of this technology!

Media Spaces: a panel lacking the future The panel featured Buxton and other famous researchers. Very good intro about the history of media-spaces (which you could name also telepresence), and some insight about the present, but.. the future? No real answer, and a shared feeling that the market of mobile devices is driving it all. Buxton said: “more is less! (more technology, in the right place, becomes less complexity).

A taste of digital Pen & Paper
I missed some workshop in the past and still wasn’t able to use the digital pen&paper technology. Hopefully ETH Zurich booth with Beat Signer showed their iPaper suite for digital annotation (and much more), and also a poster from Jurgen Steimle about, i would say, the future of Post-It. Both use Anoto technology, and both say that Anoto (who is the only widely available provider of APIs and tech) is “holding back” too much in terms of licensing agreements, and that is one of the reasons why digital pen&paper isn’t still widely used.