Innovative Technology Weblog

A few days ago Microsoft announced a very cool, promising and high tech table! It’s called “Microsoft Surface”.

If you haven’t heard of it already check out a quick demo of it’s capabilities:

When you search YouTube for a while you will find more great previews of Microsoft Surface like this one, or this on with Bill Gates or this quick review from popularmechanics.com.

But when you search on you will find some other (older) video’s of a similar product from a Mr Han and his company Perceptive Pixel (he also comes back in the review from popularmachines.com).

Ok, so Microsoft isn’t the first one to announce a product like this, they are working on it for a really long time (from 2001) and the product looks great. So their is no reason to become less enthousiastic.

The next questions is: where can I buy this and for how much? Unfortunately you’ll have to wait till at least the winter of 2007 to have your own Minority Report experience. And by then it will cost around the $5000-$10.000.

But thank god for the Internet because their is a cheap way you can build your own Surface. For as little as $10 you can buy an article about how to make your own Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection. Written by the same Mr Han again!

If even those ten dollars sounds to expensive for you, I’ve found an other short description on Tinker.it on how to build your own. This is all you need:

1 panel of plexiglass 8mm thickness
2 strips of IR LEDs (18 LED per strip)
2 sheets of tracing paper
1 projector
1 mirror
1 analog camera sensitive to IR light
1 IR filter for the camera
1 computer

Read the whole article here.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.