Microsoft Launches New Product Category: Surface Computing Comes to Life in Restaurants, Hotels, Retail Locations and Casino Resorts.

Microsoft Surface Computing brings to life a whole new way to interact with information that engages the senses, improves collaboration and empowers consumers. By utilizing the best combination of connected software, services and hardware, Microsoft is at the forefront of developing surface computing products that push computing boundaries, deliver new experiences that break down barriers between users and technology, and provide new opportunities for companies to engage with people.
First commercially available surface computer from Microsoft breaks down barriers and provides effortless interaction with information using touch, natural gestures and physical objects.

Microsoft Surface™, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft that breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.
The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing people to interact with content and information on their own or collaboratively with their friends and families, just like in the real world. Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that small groups can use at the same time. From digital finger painting to a virtual concierge, Surface brings natural interaction to the digital world in a new and exciting way.

The Human Touch: Microsoft Surface puts people in control of their experiences with technology, making everyday tasks entertaining, enjoyable and efficient. Imagine ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger. Imagine quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Imagine creating and sending a personal postcard of vacation pictures instantly to friends and family, while still wearing flip-flops.

Direct interaction. Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands, interacting with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard. You can buy songs from a virtual music store and drag them directly into a Zune music player that you’ve placed on the glass. You can set a cellphone down on the table — and copy photos into it just by dragging them into the cellphone’s zone.

You won’t see surface computers for sale at Wal-Mart any time soon. The product will be Microsoft branded and available to the company's four partners--Harrah's Entertainment, International Game Technologies, Starwood Hotels, and T-Mobile.
Never mind today's buzz about social networking--with Surface and its multi-touch technology, Microsoft envisions a new era of social computing. Certainly, the horizontal, tabletop configuration of Surface raises a variety of possibilities, such as friends gathering for drinks in a hotel lounge and sharing photos and videos
Microsoft's definition of surface computing: direct interaction (for example, you might "dip" your finger on an on-screen paint palette, and then use your finger to draw on the screen); multi-touch contact, so the screen can react to multiple fingers and inputs simultaneously; multi-user experience, so multiple people can gather around and interact with the screen simultaneously; and object recognition, so the surface can recognize tagged objects and interact with them.

Inside the Table

Microsoft Surface couples standard PC components with the cameras and projectors necessary to enable surface computing. The demo unit employed a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and an off-the-shelf graphics card with standard drivers (and Microsoft's own application layer to allow the GPU to help with sensing touch).

The images the PC outputs are displayed on the tabletop surface through a short-throw DLP projector contained inside the table; the lens is just 21 inches from the surface. The rear-projection system produces a 30-inch-diagonal, 4:3-aspect-ratio image at a resolution of 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz.

The table also houses a power supply, stereo speakers, an infrared illuminator, and five overlapping cameras that sense movement on its surface. The cameras feed images of objects on the surface--be they fingers or tagged objects such as game pieces, a Wi-Fi camera, or a digital audio player--back into the computer, where they're processed mostly in the GPU. The specially treated surface's multi-touch capability has no implicit limit.
This multi-touch screen is also a key feature of Apple’s iPhone. You can do the same two-finger stretching business on its all-glass screen to zoom in on a picture or a Web page. Let’s make one thing clear: multi-touch computing does not mean the end of the keyboard and mouse.