The software giant announced today at the D5 conference that it’s built
a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside
its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard
and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be
hands-on.
Microsoft Surface Teaser:
Microsoft Surface - The Possibilities:
Microsoft's corporate campus is a
sprawling affair,with more than 100 buildings scattered over 261 acres.
To make sense of it all, you have to navigate by numbers. The Microsoft Visitor
Center, for instance, is in Building 127, north campus, while the Microsoft
Conference Center is in Building 33, just down the road from the company soccer
and baseball fields. About 4 miles away, however, there is an unnumbered
building that is decidedly "off campus." In that building, Microsoft has quietly
been developing the first completely new computing platform since the PC — a
project that was given the internal code name Milan. This past March, when the
project was still operating on the down low, I became the first reporter invited
inside these offices. My hosts politely threatened legal consequences if I
blabbed about the project to anyone not directly involved in it, then escorted
me down a dark hallway to a locked corner conference room. Inside that room was
Microsoft's best-kept technology secret in years ... a coffee table.
The
product behind the Milan project is called the Microsoft Surface, and the
company's unofficial Surface showman is Jeff Gattis. He's a clean-cut fellow who
is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars. He spoke in sentences
peppered with "application scenarios," "operational efficiencies" and "consumer
pain points" while he took me through a few demonstrations of what the Surface
can do. One of Gattis's consumer pain points is the frustrating mess of cables,
drivers and protocols that people must use to link their peripheral devices to
their personal computers. Surface has no cables or external USB ports for
plugging in peripherals. For that matter, it has no keyboard, no mouse, no
trackball — no obvious point of interaction except its screen.
Gattis
took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital
pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each
picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled
the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a
cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it — just like that, the
pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick. He was dragging and
dropping virtual content to physical objects. I'm not often surprised by new
technology, but I can honestly say I'd never seen anything like it.
