Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.
MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).
IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.
Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.
Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.
Related posts:
A much more thorough review of touch and multi-touch research can be found on Bill Buxton’s website:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
On the one hand their work is great. Probably best in field. On the other, it sucks that they feel they need to pretend that the whole movement started internal to MS. Lamers.
[…] As Harry Brignull and Bill Buxton have both pointed out, Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to make the iPhone. Multitouch research has been going on since the early eighties. The games industry has been making use of gesture and natural physics for years now. And smart phones have been around for a long while. […]