As editor of Get ready for a lot of hype about Surface, a cool looking new product from Microsoft Corp. Super-rich geek leader Bill Gates gave NBC's Today a peak at the product yesterday:
“Pretty exciting, eh?” Gates said with a sly smile, when he put his hand down on what looked initially like a low, black coffee table: At the touch of his hand, the hard, plastic tabletop suddenly dissolved into what looked like tiny ripples of water. The ‘water’ responded to each of his fingers and the ripples rushed quickly away in every direction.“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.” When I placed my hand on the table at the same time, there were more ripples.
It took a moment to appreciate what was happening. Every hand motion Gates or I did was met with an immediate response from the table. There was no keyboard. There was no mouse. Just our gestures.
“All you have to do is reach out and touch the Surface,” Gates told me with barely concealed pride. “And it responds to what you do.”
In an industry whose bold pronouncements about the future have taught me the benefits of skepticism, Surface took my breath away. If the Surface project rollout goes as planned in November, it could alter the way everyday Americans control the technology that currently overwhelms many of us.
The story says the impact-resistant plastic top skin hides five infrared scanners, a projector and a wireless modem. "The scanners recognize objects and shapes placed on the top and respond to them accordingly. For example, if the scanners recognize fingers, and the fingers have been placed in color circles that appear on the surface, the projector shows colored lines that follow the tracings and movements of your fingers. Meanwhile, an internal modem sends and receives signals from any electronic device placed on it."
The whole thing is hard to describe, so if you're interested in more information I suggest checking out the Microsoft link up above. I surfed around the site a bit and couldn't find an answer to my main question: How much will it cost?