Surface Computing - A glimpse of what is to come

Sorry for the inactivity lately, been real busy with house!

Ok, so i'm not going to say that it always happens to be the case, but i'm pretty sure that they're somehow related. Sci Fi movies have a habit of making some very creative people come up with some amazing things. Old shows like Star Trek have inspired some pretty cool stuff! And a lot of these technologies that were not around a few years ago, are very much taken for granted today - cell phone? computer? Google?

Today i want to talk about surface computing. Most of us remember Minority Report, and those who have seen it must remember the "computer" that they used in the movie. A completely transparent multi touch interface device that wasn't restricted to a keyboard and mouse, but instead flowed freely with movements from your hands and fingers. It looked so futuristic and incredible, everyone spoke about it, everyone imagined a future with it. But in reality, people knew that it was just something out of a movie, and we would never really see it in real life. Please keep in mind that in 2002 (when the movie was released) we barely had flat screen monitors, let alone touch sensitive transparent displays!!

Only the wine glass, frame, and text areas are being rendered by the panel.
Everything on the cloth is sitting behind the screen and being shown through it.

5 years later, along comes the Iphone (as much as i dont like Apple, the Iphone set a standard and really pushed the envelope when it came to mobile / touch technology). In spite of the fact that touch screens had been around for a while on Point of Sales systems, some arcade games and some expensive computer peripherals, the multi-touch input of the Iphone was revolutionary. A mobile device with just 1 physical button and the rest was controlled by touch. It was the beginning of the touch revolution. Since the iphone was let loose, more and more multi touch devices are being launched, flooding the market with different shapes, sizes, operating systems and functionality. Besides this, a large number of display manufacturers are racing to be the first to release transparent displays. Although we are a bit far off Minority Report standards, it is going to be a reality pretty soon.

A tangible step forward has been Microsoft Surface. This has been in the works for quite a while, and to be honest, I thought it would be mainstream by now, but I guess they have had some setbacks, There are always new videos and snippets popping up on the net, and the one that inspired this article was someone playing Portal and a flight simulator. Although you can see that the controls and response are not yet quite as fluid as one would want, its a work in progress and will only be improving as time goes by.

At this point, the non-tech people might be asking "how does this affect me, and why should i care?". Well in layman's terms: Thin transparent multi touch displays. These will be displays that can be placed on any surface, actually these displays will become the surface. Picture this: you go to a restaurant and as soon as you sit down at your table, instead of having to wait for someone to bring you a menu, you just browse what the place has to offer using the display on your table! You can order your food, drinks and whatever you wish for without making any human contact whatsoever. You could be in a foreign country and with a simple tap of the screen, everything is translated to something you can understand making the language barrier obsolete. Once you're done with dinner, you wont even have to ask for the bill but effortlessly pay through the surface itself. There is no untrained impolite waiter getting everything wrong, there is no delay waiting for someone to take your order, it is you that controls your experience.

Coffee tables will never be the same again

This is truly just the beginning. Once these surfaces evolve and learn to incorporate current technologies, you will be able to view and transfer contacts from a phone, photos from a camera,. documents from a laptop, all through the surface itself. So your coffee table at home could be set so that as soon as you place your camera onto it, the recent photos taken will automatically be opened and displayed on the surface where you would be able to view / edit and even share them with another device by simply dragging them to the laptop or phone you have sitting next to your camera. Add the transparent factor to all of the above, and you can have your bedroom windows dim automatically letting a certain amount of light in, while telling you the temperature and weather forecast, or your bathroom mirror showing you the news as your brush your teeth in the morning.

The possibilities are truly endless and before we know it, we are going to be surrounded by this amazing technology. In the next couple of years we will start seeing more and more of these large touch screen computers (they were used in every US news show during the last US election), and as that happens they will slowly creep into our homes. Before you know it, we'll be taking them for granted too :)

So next time you see a futuristic sci-fi movie, never take it too lightly!! :)

thanks for reading :)