It’s not an Iphone, its a bigass table

Le plus drôle, une parodie de Surface signée SarcasticGamer.com.

Le plus intéressant, une review du produit par les mêmes personnes invités par Microsoft suite à la vidéo virale. Comme ils disent “Rather than telling us which anatomical cavity we could shove our video into, the email was an invitation to come to Washington and experience Surface Computing for ourselves”.

Pour info, ca coûterait environ 10.000$.

Et en passant, quelques considérations sur le Surface Computing et le Multi-Touch d’Apple, qui sont bien différents.

Make no mistake: multi-touch and direct manipulation interfaces like Milan (Microsoft’s development code name for surface computing) are very cool. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the consumer market is so excited about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone: it will be the first multi-touch direct manipulation device available to consumers. But as with many concept demos, the devil here is in the details, and Microsoft’s surface computing initiative is very different from — and probably will never compete with — the technologies Apple is introducing in the iPhone.

Microsoft’s technology:

1. Depends on cameras and projectors for its magic. This isn’t a touch-screen technology, but an optical one. That has some huge advantages, like the ability to use brushes to paint, but also has some disadvantages, like the need for dim lighting to avoid washing out the screen and the need to put bar codes on objects for the system to recognize them.

2. Focuses on large interactions instead of small. Despite claims Microsoft has been shopping this technology to Windows Mobile phone makers, this technology is clearly designed to work primarily in large kiosk-like settings than mobile phones. You need large empty spaces for optical projectors and cameras — that’s why you can’t hang projection TVs on your wall like you can a plasma or LCD display. There’s no room in a mobile phone for the optics needed to implement this type of surface system there — and using a multi-touch enabled touch-screen would undoubtedly run afoul of Apple’s patents on that technology.

3. Doesn’t fit in the PC ecosystem. Even if consumers were OK with the many-cubic-foot bulk of these surface systems, Microsoft says in its press release that it will distribute this technology largely through a distribution and development agreement with International Game Technology. That means you’re much more likely to see this technology in your next video poker machine at the Venetian casino than you are in the PC you get from Best Buy.