Microsofts infamous “Project Milan” is in fact a touch-sensitive table. Dubbed “Surface Computing” and has had five years in the making. Surface computing as microsoft has dubbed it uses touch as its primary source of input. Painting with surface sounds particularly intuitive: can you imagine using a paint brush or simply dip your fingers into virtual paint cups. Photo resizing and stacking works much like the iPhone’s zoom gestures. Not to mention the system is completely MultiUser capable, and runs on a Windows Vista backend tweaked by the Microsoft Project Milan team.
The system looks like it’s had a hell of a lot of work into it, the WPF effects seem to all be in place, and the entire minority report style of sweeping files around is spectacular. Also theirs something that people have missed in the past and keep saying this is just a big iphone. Forget for a moment that the iPhone can’t even run custom applications, and the fact the Surface is 30″. But beyond that theirs nothing like sitting a phone on the Surface computer, and gesturing photos and videos to the phone, or dragging them out, hell the visual effect of unloading images from portable devices is spectacular!
The drawback is that the technology comes out of the reach of most people coming in at $10,000 each. The good news is Microsoft expects the system to drop in price over the next 2-3 years to a point where we could start seeing them show up in everyones houses. Could you imagine, dinner tables, counters, all surface enabled! But for now with its current price tag, its targetted more towards stores, hotels, and restaurants as a way to show off and oneup their competitors it’s pretty much the ultimate piece of office furniture that most people would give their right arm for. And from the look of the below video it looks to be damn worth it!
