It was just about the strangest call I’d ever received from Microsoft. “We have a new product we want to show you,” said the PR woman (I’m paraphrasing). “But we can’t tell you what it is, or even what category. But it’s truly revolutionary. It’s going to change the way people work with their computers.”
Wow. Already, the hype needle was in the red zone. What was it, a ten-button mouse?
Nope. What it was, as the world found out yesterday, was a new touch-screen computer. The 30-inch screen sits 21 inches off the ground, as though it is the top of a fancy coffee table. You manipulate objects on the screen with your fingers. Drag virtual photos to sort them, flick an on-screen globe to spin it and so on.
This new “surface computer,” as Microsoft calls it, has a multi-touch screen. You can use two fingers or even more — for example, you can drag two corners of a photograph outward to zoom in on it. Here’s an article in yesterday’s Times about it.
This multi-touch screen is also a key feature of Apple’s iPhone. You can do the same two-finger stretching business on its all-glass screen to zoom in on a picture or a Web page.
Microsoft’s press materials and Web site coyly ignore the existence of these earlier pioneers; when pressed, it insists that its surface computer was developed well before Jeff Han *or* Apple came along. Microsoft says that 120 people have been secretly working on its version, tucked away in an off-campus building, for five years.
Microsoft’s version of the multi-touch computer adds one very cool, though impractical, twist: interaction with other electronics.
For example, in Microsoft’s demonstration, you can take some pictures. When you set the camera down on the table top, the fresh photos come pouring out of it into a virtual puddle on the screen — a slick, visual way to indicate that you’ve just downloaded them.
Next, you can set a cellphone down on the table — and copy photos into it just by dragging them into the cellphone’s zone.
Then you can buy songs from a virtual music store and drag them directly into a Zune music player that you’ve placed on the glass.
How cool is all of this? Very. Unfortunately, at this point, it’s the Microsoft version of a concept car; you can ogle it, but you can’t have it. These stunts require concept cameras, concept cellphones and concept music players that have been rigged to interact with the surface computer.
Behind the scenes, the surface computer is a pretty elaborate setup. Under the hood is Windows Vista, although you don’t see any trace of it. A projector sits underneath the tabletop, projecting images onto it. Five video cameras observe your hand movements and relay information to the computer.
You won’t see surface computers for sale at Wal-Mart any time soon. This fall, Microsoft will begin by installing these machines in 1,200 T-mobile cellphone stores; Starwood Hotels; Harrah’s casino; and IGT video-game stores. For the moment, in other words, Microsoft is selling surface computers only to other companies (for $5,000 to $10,000 per unit, depending on the size of the order).
Even without the involvement of other gadgets, though, Microsoft offers some tasty demo modules to show the possibilities.
Restaurant. You pull up on-screen, virtual menus on all four edges of the table at once — because four of you are eating out together — and order your meal by tapping what you want. While you wait for the food, you can each play your own video game, or open up four different Web browsers. And then, after dinner, you can call up your bill, split it four ways, and pay, all electronically.
Virtual Concierge. You walk into a hotel. You see a virtual model of, say, New York City; look up a restaurant; see what it looks like; and drag the restaurant’s address and phone number into your phone, where it shows up as a text message.
Paint Canvas. Finger-painting for the new millennium. That’s gotta be worth $10,000 right there.
Video Puzzle. In this game demo, clear glass tiles (real ones) are placed onto a video that’s playing on the surface. Now you can scatter and scramble them on the glass, even turning them upside-down; the challenge is to reassemble the video by moving and flipping the tiles, as though it’s a new-age jigsaw puzzle.
T-Mobile Stores. In this phone-store demonstration, you can take a phone model off the shelf — or several — and put them onto the tabletop to get the details, like features, calling plans, and so on. You can build a side-by-side comparison, sample some ringtones, or assign a ringtone to someone in your contacts list just by sliding it onto the appropriate name. (Again, this demo doesn’t work with any current phones.)
There’s a lot of imagination going on here, for sure, but even more hype. I’m especially discouraged by the Web headlines that breathlessly gush about a revolution in computing — including, alas, Popular Mechanics.com. “Forget the keyboard and mouse,” says the headline. “The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.”
Let’s make one thing clear: multi-touch computing does not mean the end of the keyboard and mouse.
As the new world of multi-touch-screen computing dawns, you’ll see a lot of demos involving photo stretching and Web surfing demos. But you will *never* see word processors, e-mail programs, spreadsheets, databases or accounting programs.
That’s because touch-screen computers are terrible for these mainstream computing tasks. Typing of any kind, in fact, is a nightmare when you can’t feel the keys. It’s inaccurate, slow and unsatisfying.
Microsoft says that it has big plans for its surface-computing initiative: more sizes and shapes are on the way, and someday, lower prices and maybe home editions. And that’s awesome.
But if this is truly the future of computing, Microsoft will first have to overcome the mother of all chicken-and-egg conundrums. Surface computers won’t go mainstream until we all have phones, cameras and music players that work with them — and nobody will manufacture those gadgets until there’s a critical mass of surface computers.
In the meantime, a word of advice: don’t throw away your keyboard.