[IxDA Discuss] What do you think of Microsoft Surface

[Fred Beecher]

On 5/30/07, Jeremiah Peschka <jeremiah.peschka at gmail.com> wrote:
> Surface certainly has phenomenal cool and novelty factors going for it.  The
> possibilities of using it as something like a smart kiosk in a busy hotel
> lobby or other public location are phenomenal.  In situations like this,
> Surface will excel.

Definitely. I think the first planned use is in the commercial space,
where there are many appropriate uses for a natural interface like
this. Consumers will have access to it some time later.

> For long term interaction with computers, the interface needs to be more
> than novel, it needs to be natural and comfortable.  I can't see many people

Agreed. The ergonomic issues involved seem pretty major to me. If you
look at the pictures of people using it, their postures look like they
would get very uncomfortable after more than five minutes. Possibly
before then.

> I also think the restaurant scene stinks of many of Bill Gates's pipe dreams
> that he outlined in The Road Ahead.  Part of our interaction at a restaurant
> depends so much on the description of the food on paper.  This is something
> that I think many customers expect.  I certainly can't see this being picked
> up outside of chain restaurants like Applebee's and Friday's.

When I saw that I had an immediate urge to grab a joystick and play
Ms. Pac-Man on it. :)

> There's a lot of novelty here, but behind the novelty and cool of Surface,
> I'm not sure that I actually see a lot of room for realistic, day to day,
> interaction.

In the consumer space, I do see some room, but for most tasks this
likely very expensive table would be overkill. Here are some of the
good uses I can imagine for it:

  - Interfacing with music collections stored on other computers in
the home and selecting music to play on the home stereo.

  - As above, but with movies, videos, etc.

  - Games. Obviously.

  - Sharing content with others. (The content transfer interaction
looks *extremely* cool, but I can see all sorts of problems with
implementing it... first off, how can it possibly work with every
device out there, which is what it needs to do to be useful.)

If they shrunk this down into a tablet PC sized format and basically
made it a glorified master remote control, I think that would be a
more appropriate format for these tasks (with the exception of sharing
content, which can already be done through email, and playing games,
which can already be done in far too many ways).

- Fred