Microsoft Milan Surface Computing

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The Microsoft Milan Surface Computing system represents 5 years of development. We have seen similar demonstrations in the past, the SensitiveWall Towers and Ultimate Gaming Touch Screen come to mind. The Microsoft system looks more refined however new product demos always look great…

Videos after the jump.

“At its core, Milan is powered by a fairly standard high-end Vista PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card, 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2GB of memory. To make the touch screen work, Microsoft crams a lot of other stuff into its tabletop unit. Underneath the roughly textured scratch-proof and spill-proof surface covering the top of the unit, five infrared cameras sense fingers or other objects touching the surface, while a DLP projector turned on its side generates the screen image people see.

As for Milan, the software maker hopes to get the technology into lots of other areas, such as the education market, in addition to into consumers’ hands. Although the initial customers are getting the same tabletop design, Microsoft says the product will eventually come in other shapes and sizes, including vertical, or stand-up units.”



Via: Crave and Ubergizmo

 

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14 Comments



  3. Dont be a twat all your life. I am sure it has been done before, but this is done WELL.


  4. Yea, but Microsoft wasen’t selling a one-off shot of a concept product. They are selling the table, yes, but they are selling the SOFTWARE behind it.

    The interface with the phones, the cameras, the credit cards. Someone is going to have to program that and make sure it is all working right on every system. Microsoft is good at doing that, most of the time.

    All in all, I think that Microsoft has the best solution so far. I mean Apple has a good idea with the iPhone, but I think that is only the first step. There needs to be SOMETHING to link everything together.

    Right now technology is a bunch of islands in a vast ocean. Yes, there are some ways to connect your phone to your comptuer (bluetooth) but there’s never been a good way to use your phone’s GPS on your laptop, or to transfer pictures and stuff from device to device that is easy enough for grandma to understand.

    But she can take her camera, place it on the table, as well as her picture frame and drag the pictures from one to the other.


  5. FTIR: Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. Google it to find out how it works. Not a new idea, but I actually thought Apple had patented it…or someone big anyway.


  6. Wow, if not for the fact im sure it will cost more than I will be making this year I would say I want one now lol


  7. Not too bad actually. I believe $5,000-$10,000. Better than I expected


  8. Hmm this is the most advanced version ive seen ill take 2 !!


  9. Had Planned to build one of these for my coffee table anyway once I had my house sorted out…
    Fairly simple to do hardware wise. Unfortunately Microsoft are well known for having their devices not work with other devices… Well in my experience anyway…
    Just look at the mess they made with their bluetooth stack on XP, why do you think the major bluetooth dongle manufacturers never used it?

    Although Vista’s bluetooth support is better, its not perfect.

    So maybe by 2020 they will have this out there working as smoothly as it appears in the demo..

    Nice Idea, all perfectly feasable, but i am not keeping my hopes up…


  10. THis is really amazing, check out the ms site for it now. I would really love to see this take off and become main stream.


  11. how about the power supply?how it works?


  12. I would think the power supply and most of the hardware would be off the shelf.


  13. How it works ?????

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