Yesterday Gizmodo were reporting on a possible top secret product launch from Microsoft, and I've just spotted that Rob Rohan has caught and blogged about it:
Microsoft Surface
As Rob says, just watch the videos! It is really impressive to finally see this technology put to real use, and Microsoft claim that it will be popping up in hotels, restaurants and other venues later this year!
I was blown away by a few of the examples in the video on the site, using Surface to:
- place orders and split the bill at a restaruant/bar
- sort through a music collection to build a playlist and share music between devices
- view photos and share photos between devices
A few quick facts from the site:
- Surface currently exists in a 30 inch form factor, with more form factors to come in the future
- Surface can "simultaneously recognise dozens and dozens of movements" suchs as touches, gestures, and objects that have identification tags (similar to barcodes), such as mobile devices, customer cards and other purpose built objects used to interact with Surface
- It runs a custom software platform on top of Windows Vista
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 was just announced at MIX08 and the IEBlog has the lowdown on the improvements they have concentrated on for this release, including full CSS 2.1 support, better scripting performance, the beginnings of HTML5 support, built-in developer tools, automatic crash recovery, and a new feature called "WebSlices" (this is similar to something that I've always wanted to hack up into a Vista Sidebar gadget!)
