Full FeedGates lifts a finger, demos new Touch Wall
It’s his last time to host a Microsoft CEO Summit as company chairman before answering philanthropy’s call, so Bill Gates decided to use the opportunity for one more demonstration of Microsoft Research prowess. Gates allowed the high-profile executives attending the annual meeting of high-dollar minds to see Microsoft’s Touch Wall, which threatens the existence of whiteboards and Magic Markers in all those sterile conference rooms around the world.
So far it’s been a good year for touch-screen technology, big and small; besides the iPhone and all its competitors, there’s the touch technology on display during coverage of primary elections on CNN. Microsoft’s offering is basically its Surface computer mounted vertically and expanded out to a 50-inch screen. Gates showed off interactivity with documents, Tablet-style writing and easy access to applications like PowerPoint, and promised that the technology would not be all that expensive. Still, after the showing this week in Redmond for the business elite, you can expect corner offices in corporate headquarters across America to be the first places for the Touch Wall to show up.
Read [Seattle Times]
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Okay, in one corner we have Bill Gates demoing a touch-screen digital whiteboard version of the Surface and promising that the technology will eventually be “not that expensive”. And over in the other corner we have Johnny Lee on YouTube demoing how to hack a Wii controller and $15 worth of LEDs and a battery into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen, and a head-mounted 3-D virtual reality viewer. See http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wii+remote+hack.
According to the Times article, Gates “navigated through a range of digital objects including documents, PowerPoint slides, and video. he ‘wrote’ on one document… and zoomed in to see details of a flow chart on another.” Lee’s hackery would let you accomplish pretty much the same thing with pretty much the same amount of hardware.
I don’t know how many millions Microsoft Research spent on this development or how expensive the Microsoft Touch Wall is going to be, but if some hacker can do the same thing for $50, then some startup is also going to do the same thing for about the same price. Gates says such technology “will be absolutely pervasive,” but it ain’t gonna be Microsoft that makes it so.
on May 15, 2008 at 09:33 PM - LINK