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.

These last months have been very busy for me, working on the tabulaTouch device and all the software that surrounds it and that will make the development of a new kind of applications easy and fast. In the meantime, the whole net world turned its face towards multi-touch, following on Jeff Han’s new startup, DIY experiments and rumors of Apple releasing a new line of touch-enabled products (iPhone being a clever announcement to gather and redirect multi-touch hype on them.. very Jobs). It’s fun now to see myself saying “yes! yes! i knew it!”.
I am particularly proud of the tabulaGraph sample, a simple concept mapping template that shows some of the potential in constructing knowledge collaboratively, presented at the Alpine Workshop in late january. Exciting moment, indeed.

 

The IUI2007 Conference will feature the Tangible Play Workshop: “Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games”. This is very interesting, also because the conference venue is at the Hawaii, but right now i’m too busy working on tabulaTouch (yes, i know there haven’t been news for quite a long time.. but we are working a lot).
I hope to hear/read something about the workshop, Philips will be talking about tabletop games from an industry perspective, and this is the right time (where is MERL heading with DiamondTouch?).

In my view, games are the optimal ice-breaker for tabletop technologies, even if the real advantage of a clever interaction design on tables has to be found in other, more business-related, markets..

Instead, i will be attending a workshop in january at the CSCL Alpine Rendez-Vous called “The Classroom of the Future” where we will be investigating roomware and tabletop applied to learning, see you there.

Philips Entertaible tabletop device was recently shown at IFA fair.
Nothing more was disclosed about the platform than the previous press release (the technology behind is described as IR leds plus photodiodes, robust to room illumination changes), but there are some videos that clearly show the market target: board games.
Las Vegas, indeed, would be a very good place to start selling tabletop solutions.

 

 

I am pleased to announce the birth of tabulaTouch, the multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction i’ve been researching from the beginning of the year at Natural Interaction.
You may notice a similarity with Jeff Han’s project that made the net go “wow” in march.
Actually, my research started in the second part of 2005 following an intuition on the FTIR principle applied in Lightable,a pure design project that had nothing to do with interaction. I was assembling the table while Han’s paper came out, you know, ideas are in the air way before we catch them.
tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.
The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.
We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.
A very special thank goes to Viviana for her help in the initial hardware-related steps, and Fabrizio for his skills in electronics.
You can check a sample video in the NIRC projects page, as well as a longer version on YouTube.

It seems HP is joining the tabletop-interested gang too. "Misto" is described as a special edition touchscreen-pc, no words on multi-touch capability but explicit game-oriented vision like in Philips Entertaible.

Another good sign from the big ones.

Jefferson Y. Han has developed the missing chain in the TableTop world, a true multi-touch device that can be realized with little technological effort.
It is vision based, ultra fast and precise, now Mitsubishi and Philips are not the only ones out there.

On january 4, during CES in Las Vegas, Philips presented Entertaible: a novel interactive table featuring a 30 inches display that has multitouch capabilities.

They seem to be looking at the entertainment world and seem serious about mass marketing something based on it.

The video is very interesting, even if the performance is a bit sluggish but.. hey, it’s Philips, i think we are only allowed to see some old video shots taken from a prototype.

So, with Philips entering the scene, MERL with its DiamondTouch device is not the only one dominating the about-to-arrive tabletop market with a multitouch platform.
Let the games begin..