Microsoft Student Partners

While in Sydney at the Microsoft headquarters I had an opportunity to play with a Surface and after watching the Future Visions video this got me thinking about the future of computing, especially touch computing and how the surface plays a part in this.

At the moment multi-touch computing is struggling to take off because of the fact that outside the iPhone hardware is expensive, multi-touch development is young, casual developers can’t really afford the hardware and the application base does not yet exist because of this. It is a case of catch-22, people won’t use them as there is no support but people won’t support them till people are using them. This problem will be solved with time as the hardware price lowers to a more consumer/developer friendly price and as the number of applications slowly grows multi-touch devices such as the Surface and multi-touch tablet PC’s will become ubiquitous, we are at the beginning end what is surely to be an exponential growth.

After pondering on this I realised one ideal situation for the Surface would be a restaurant, your table could be a (larger version) of the Surface with icons on the side from which you could drag food and drink menus out from passing one to each diner on the table, you could then peruse this digital menu and drag items off of it for comparison or to pass an item to a companion as a suggestion or some such. Your meals and drinks could be ordered from the table itself where your order would then be sent to the kitchen or bar. Glasses in this theoretical restaurant could be RFID tagged and placed on a surface behind the bar where your drink order would appear attached to an empty glass, your drink would be placed into it and brought to your table. These glasses would also solve the problem of getting glasses mixed up as your table would label whose glass is whose and would (if you so desire) tell others what you are drinking to quell such curiosity.

With a Surface as your table this would be an ideal place to go to celebrate a birthday or a return from a holiday. While waiting for your meal you could plug in a USB drive into the table and browse holiday snaps of childhood photos across the table, play a game with friends or just scribble notes or doodles.

As everything is automated but for the food and drink preparation and delivery efficiency would be increased, potentially valuable ordering data is automatically saved and errors are reduced, the downside however would be that this technology is very expensive and this would be a very experimental venture but I do believe (and hope) some day it will be entirely common place if not even better then what I can imagine.

-Mitchell
Curtin MSP

As some of you may already have seen Microsoft Office Labs has released a 5 minute video of what they dream the year 2019 should be. I have to say that the video is very impressive with Hollywood level production values and some interesting concepts.

While it must be a nice job to be paid to dream and then spending a lot of money on putting that dream into an awesome video I feel that videos like this are important to show possible directions technology can or should take, to act as a goal to strive for, a beacon placed in the future to guide us.

While I do love the future they envision here, not everything will be so uniform as I do like my dark themes and others like red, blue or fluorescent pink styles, some like curvy designs while others like leather coated sharp designs with brushed aluminium.

For all this to happen screens will need to be developed that are incredibly cheap, flexible, low power (or wireless power) and sensor laden and tiny or remote computers with powerful graphics processing will need to be tied to them then every product will have to be coated with these screen, oh we will also need decent internet (and at this rate that isn’t likely to happen by 2019 unless people start picking up their act) and interfaces will have to become a lot easier to create (Microsoft is doing a good job working on this at this moment). Apparently in the future we will also either have people hired full time to clean fingerprints or we will remove the ability produce oil removed from the skin on our hands, even better though would be to have this magic surface absorb fingerprints for the purposes of power generation/scratch repair/some other awesome and magic purpose.

This is all doable by some point in the future but 2019 seems way too soon, I am wondering if they chose such a difficult goal so that we shall try and pursue it, and even if we only get half way to this goal we have still covered a lot of ground. Then again in 10 years we went from 1.44mb 3.5″ floppy disks to 16gb in the size of your pinky nail. we went from some people having analogue mobiles with 2 colour screens to everyone having full colour graphical phones with calendars, games, web browsing and media playback being standard so who knows where we will be in another 10 years.

below is the HD version of the full length video.