Windows Surface

Forget clicking and dragging, let your customers really touch the data.

Imagine sitting down with clients around what appears to be a coffee table, except it has a screen showing the corporate logo. You begin talking about the new product you're launching. You touch the corporate logo on the table, and the display changes to show high-res images of your top products. You touch the photograph of one of the products, and a video starts playing, showing the benefits of the product.

The customer points to a particular element, and the display changes to show more detailed information and pricing details. The customer places their mobile phone on the table, and those details are uploaded onto their phone so they can take them away and study them at leisure.

If this all sounds a bit Star Trek-y, it isn't. The technology being described is Microsoft Surface, and as Microsoft's Eileen Brown told us, it's available here and now, and chances are you'll be managing Surface devices in your own company quite soon.

Microsoft Surface is a 30 inch tabletop display that you interact with using touch and gestures. You can pick up 'objects' and move them around, move information between objects by picking them up.

As Eileen explained, "Surface knows the difference between a finger and a hand when you're touching the surface, and it's incredibly easy to work with, it feels completely natural. Equally importantly, it recognises where you're sitting, so that if you touch an image or a video, it opens oriented towards you. This isn't limited to one person, several people can be interacting with Surface at once, and the data relevant to what they're interested in will be shown to each of them, all oriented so it appears 'the right way up' to that person."

Under the surface, this is driven by a number of infrared–sensitive cameras that are used to pinpoint where you are around the table when you're interacting with it. There are five cameras which know the orientation of your fingers so they can present the data to you correctly.

Surface ships with some basic applications including virtual concierge, photos and music. These can be customised, and developers are working on a range of other applications.

For example, security teams at the US Super Bowl used a system that included software running on Microsoft Surface. The system was integrated with real-time group communications for two-way radios and other devices running on Office Communications Server for PC for voice connections, and a security management product that manages the planning, tracking and reporting all security matters surrounding the big game. The Surface application integrated with these applications and Virtual Earth to show incidents on a display of the area, and the team could talk to personnel on the ground to get them to the right place.

If you're interested in trying Surface for yourself, the Piccadilly Circus branch of Barclays Bank has a Surface console where customers can grab digital content with their hands and navigate information about Barclays' Premier banking account with simple gestures and touches. Some Sheraton Hotels in the USA also have Surface for virtual concierges.

You can see Surface online at Microsoft's Surface site