Leopard doesn't scratch the Surface

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EDiT Interactive Table (2008)
Multi-touch, multi-user hardware and software platform. Development in DirectX/C#/.NET.

TANGerINE (2008)
Research project about tangible interaction and smart objects.

tabulaGraph (2006)
More intuitive concept mapping on the tabulaTouch device

tabulaTouch (2005)
multi-touch tabletop interaction

wikiWall (2004)
natural concept mapping, my Master's thesis

Thursday, June 14. 2007

I took my time to let the Microsoft Surface storm quieten. Delicious entries and blog re-posts seems to have calmed down, so we can now relax and think.
Microsoft is smart, very smart, as ever. With the multi-touch bubble inflating every week, and no serious player but Jeff Han who claims he’s not going to mass market, Microsoft arrives and annonces its technology.
Not only, Microsoft chooses the best seat and says: "guys, you like multi-touch, well, we are the platform!".
The technology is convincing, the concept has enough hype, the interaction metaphors are there.. to be catched… and MS is the best system and idea integrator on this planet.
I wonder if Bill Buxton, MS research evangelist, did know about this secret project and team before the announcement… or if the team was assembled in the last 6 months cut & pasting previous research by Wilson and friends.
In the meanwhile, Leopard comes out of his shelter, and we see Jobs’ WWDC Keynote… nothing so special. It’s a carbon copy of one year ago, Jobs seems tired, not enthusiastic and somewhat disappointed to my eyes.
About what?
Without trying to foresee the man’s inner world, i imagine him illustrating the 10 key features of Leopard, cool toys (and in fact "pretty cool" is the sentence he uses most..), indeed, but at the end of the day.. that’s just another OS improvement.
Microsoft, instead, has a new computing paradigm.
I understand how you feel Jobs, and wonder that feature number 11 was some multi-touch related technology, and maybe a platform sitting somewhere that couldn’t ship in time… and MS did stole the scene, as ever.
But the ones of us who are not so interested on the giant’s fights (sorry to be so metaphoric today) can start thinking that a new world in computing is around the corner, new ideas can be expressed through this medium, and this is going to happen very soon.

Posted by Stefano Baraldi in essay, news at 14:48 | Comments (4)

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Nice post. I really hope we can make NUI Group massive, so that people won’t be stuck with just Microsoft for multitouch.

#1 gravano (Link) on 2007-06-17 13:22 (Reply)

Hi Stefano,
really an interesting post! I did not know anything about MS Surface before today, I neither heard anything about it until today. Anyway I’ve found the presentation quite interesting. This is absolutely, as we have always said, a truly revolutionary approach to human-machine interaction that has to come, and will surely do.
But there is just one thought I do not share with you, and it about "Apple defeat" in this competition for the new interaction era.
What I see is that Apple and MS are both walking on their paths in the same field, and these paths are not the same. I do not know obviously at what extent their technologies can push themselves nowadays, but I must say that I am quite sure that Apple is not chasing MS today.
My statement is: Apple is ahead of MS. And here is why: Apple is going to ship in about 70 days its new iPhone in the US. This means _multi-touch_technology_to_a_multitude_of_users today. Surface is not available today except for just a couple of demo installment.
What this observation makes me infer is that Apple is able to ship today a new portable device that offers the same kind of interaction, the same paradigm.
Another key aspect is that the kind of device chosen by Apple is much more pervasive today than what Surface is going to be in the very next future.
So, in my opinion, here there are some keywords that express Apple placement in the run for the new-interaction era:
1. today
2. portable devices
3. a technology that is programmable today
I would like to spend som words about the 3rd point: iPhone is by now extremely customizable and programmable, leveraging things like Web 2.0 and Mesh-Up Programming. This means that everyone able to mesh-up some code will be able to deliver new kind of applications meant for running on a portable device that wears a great new multitouch-UI.
Thus, closing this huge comment ;), I won’t say Apple is limping behind MS simply because Apple is there today and maybe there is something more interesting waiting for major improvements yet to come.

Hope to talk with you soon, but personally
Francesco

#2 Francesco Russo (Link) on 2007-06-17 13:39 (Reply)

Most likely Apple as well followed later on by the established hardware companies.

#2.1 gravano (Link) on 2007-10-31 13:01 (Reply)

Surface is a great showcase. With Jobs stating that multi touch on the desktop/laptop is just in the research stages at this point (so he wants us to believe), I am most curious what company brings multi touch to the consumer in the computer space (iPhone aside).

#3 Drew (Link) on 2007-08-12 00:53 (Reply)

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about

This is the blogging quarter of Stefano Baraldi.
I am a researcher, consultant and (at the end of the day) inventor of interactive hardware and software.
This blog will offer research news and insights about HCI, tabletop and multi-touch interaction, new media, knowledge management, software design and concept mapping.
Anything that lits the candle of interest in knowing, exploring and understanding..

If you are italian you may want to visit another, mostly intimist, blog.

Living in:
Bologna, Italy