#Multitouch surface computer drivers
#Multitouch surface computer code

And the Surface has the added advantage of a horizontal screen, so several people can gather around and use it together. Multitouch devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. It is an idea that has been floating around the research community since the 1980s and is swiftly becoming a hip new product interface - Apple's new iPhone has multitouch scrolling and picture manipulation. One of the key components of surface computing is a 'multitouch' screen. Surface computing uses a blend of wireless protocols, special machine-readable tags and shape recognition to seamlessly merge the real and the virtual world - an idea the Milan team refers to as 'blended reality.' The table can be built with a variety of wireless transceivers, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and (eventually) radio frequency identification (RFID) and is designed to sync instantly with any device that touches its surface. The name Surface comes from 'surface computing,' and Microsoft envisions the coffee-table machine as the first of many such devices. I'm not often surprised by new technology, but I can honestly say I'd never seen anything like it. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it - just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. For that matter, it has no keyboard, no mouse, no trackball - no obvious point of interaction except its screen. Surface has no cables or external USB ports for plugging in peripherals.

#Multitouch surface computer drivers

One of Gattis's consumer pain points is the frustrating mess of cables, drivers and protocols that people must use to link their peripheral devices to their personal computers. He spoke in sentences peppered with 'application scenarios,' 'operational efficiencies' and 'consumer pain points' while he took me through a few demonstrations of what the Surface can do. He's a clean-cut fellow who is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars. The product behind the Milan project is called the Microsoft Surface, and the company's unofficial Surface showman is Jeff Gattis. Inside that room was Microsoft's best-kept technology secret in years. My hosts politely threatened legal consequences if I blabbed about the project to anyone not directly involved in it, then escorted me down a dark hallway to a locked corner conference room. This past March, when the project was still operating on the down low, I became the first reporter invited inside these offices.

#Multitouch surface computer code

About 4 miles away, however, there is an unnumbered building that is decidedly 'off campus.' In that building, Microsoft has quietly been developing the first completely new computing platform since the PC - a project that was given the internal code name Milan. The Microsoft Visitor Center, for instance, is in Building 127, north campus, while the Microsoft Conference Center is in Building 33, just down the road from the company soccer and baseball fields. To make sense of it all, you have to navigate by numbers. We’re so pleased, in fact, that we put together a video (opens in new tab) showing the table in motion.Microsoft's corporate campus is a sprawling affair, with more than 100 buildings scattered over 261 acres. Still, we’re very pleased with how the table turned out. We’re not going to claim to have done everything perfectly the first time, so think of this article as more of a build log than a definitive how-to.

We documented the whole process, from start to finish, so that you can try building one of your own, if you’re so inspired. “Future UI article be damned,” we thought, “we’ve gotta build one of these for ourselves.”Īnd so we did. The process isn’t exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft’s $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget.

There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. What we found that surprised us the most wasn’t anything about the future of multitouch it was about something that people are doing right now. Touch interfaces are hardly futuristic at this point, but multi-touch hardware like the Microsoft Surface or the iPhone is just starting to become a big deal, and we decided to see what big things are going on in that field. It all started while we were researching an article on future user interfaces.