Microsoft Surface Coffee Table

The news is out. It is official. Microsoft are getting into the furniture market. Microsoft Surface Coffee Table.  They now have the technology to build a coffee table.

But this is no ordinary coffee table. It uses ’surface computing’,  transcending the traditional mouse and  key board experience for the user, permitting them to interact with digital content the same way they would with other objects, namely with their hands.

 A steal at just 10-15K  the touch sensitive flat screen TV doubles as a coffee table, and with the touch of your hand you can manipulate and resize your digital images.  You don’t need to do anything else to upload or download your digital content from your mobile or digital other than set it down on the table.

So now we can interact with content through touch and gesture, literally grabbing data with our hands.  Okay it is obscenely expensive and will probably appear in casinos and five star hotels before it makes its way into living rooms, but people spend $5k on HDTV screens for their living rooms and 15K for internet fridges.

Multitouch and multigestural interfaces are serious undertakings and give rise to many issues. Think of the collaborative works that could be created by people sitting around a coffee table, not to mention the copyright issues for Lawyers to disentangle.

You could use motion and touch sensors, and there are advantages and disadvantages with both.  Motion is three dimensional, whereas touch is two dimensional. The advantage of touch is that it is much simpler, whereas motion would require a much more complex processor. 

How would the table respond to me flapping my hands or dancing on it?  Picture a dance floor with the dance floor interacting with the dancers. Technology spawns creativity and things people have never thought of.  Then there is also the sensors of sound, vibration, scent.

Sound frequencies that people can’t hear, which start to set and manipulate behavioural parameters. Imagine going to a dance club where the operators are working at various levels to improve the ‘user’ experience in an interactive way.

Surely this stuff doesn’t have to be confined to a surface like a table, and it could use a wall, or floor, within the boundaries of the physical laws of gravity of course!!!!

All art has a confronting nature to it, and that is what makes it powerful, the element of making us uncomfortable.  There have been many experiments into the effects sound can have on people, which could potentially be used in crowd control, but at lower doses and different frequencies it could play a role in behavioural conditioning, and affect the overall environment.  This is a little futuristic.

At the moment I can envisage animated pictures replacing those Van Goghs hanging above the couch.   

But it doesn’t take all that much for things to get more detached from what we are familiar with, things that break the physical laws with which we are familiar with and operate within, optical illusions, holograms, things that uncomfortably create environments which are unnatural to us.

On a lighter note you could play monopoly or candyland on the coffee table; a more fun game as it would be both interactive and animated with the little popsical lady winking at you.

I wonder whether this will incite a patent war between Apple, because it does some of the things that Apple’s iphone does.

How soon will it be before someone can upload or download data in our brains?

Unlike computers, brains are obviously living things. Even twins are not  neurocompatible, and the ‘content’ would also be dynamic of course. A person’s neural network evolves (well mine does most of the time), especially when I’m dreaming or having nightmares ….about Minority Report.. and the eventual enslavement of the the human race to robots.

But apparently Lazymanandmoney isn’t satisfied with the applications offered by the Surface, and doesn’t believe  this is good value for money, whinging about the fact that it can’t be converted into an instant dining table.  Imagine having dinner around the table and the six o’clock news comes on.

Lazy man wanted a Sony Aibo but perhaps he could get a virtual pet in the meantime.

I mean seriously, when I featured the V8 Rover Coffee table  I never expected to be able to take it for a spin around the block.

Meanwhile Lazy Man has uncovered a reference to a rather macabre    ebay listing of 100 authentic parts and pieces parts from Lindsay Lohan’s smashed Mercedes SL 65 AMG black convertible

and reveals the Gen X plan to wealth creation http://genxfinance.com/2007/05/07/the-top-5-ways-to-become-a-millionaire/  which admittedly does look like a more pragmatic and respectable path to wealth creation than the alternatives he canvasses.

Unless of course you can come up with ebay auctions to ’sell your life’ like our philosophy student from Woollongong, or our ‘imaginary friend’ earning the auctioneers instant notoriety, not to mention new merchandising opportunities.  

Until then, I’ll have to sell that coffee table on ebay, and hopefully there will still be people in the market for either a Rover V8 or a wooden unit.