Recently the whole HCI community or even media art community are very keen on inventing, duplicating or copying the Multitouch interface, with different shape, form or application. M$soft show you their power of money and technology: Microsoft Surface.

According to the reserach page of Surface, it is based on the research “Play Anywhere“. Honestly, I am impressed by concept of Play anywhere, not the technology. (sure many people even students can make the similar thing easily) After the over-heat trend of Jeff Han’s FTIR Multitouch and his great presentation on TED, we found iPone. Now is Microsoft Surface. Instead, we have so many multitouch research before, by different parties like Sony CSL, Mitsubishi MERL’s Diamond Touch, etc. Multitouch Technology seems a trend of HCI research. And never ended. But the application is becoming more and more interesting.

We are impressed by Jeff Han’s Map navigation and photo album interface. We have iBar and more coffee table with interactive reaction (even it is very bad interaction design). Or iPhone’s magic.

Well, Microsoft Surface is so nice that help you to put them all together in its brand new product. You can check in the page http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ . Cool? All-in-one! And bring you more suprises!! Photo shoting and send the photo by just putting the camera on the Surface! And drag the photo to the mobile phone! Amazing! But, let’s pay attention on the word “Possibilities”. I can imagine how to make the transfer but I don’t think we can just sending a photo to a specific mobile without incidating the specific device you want to send to. Well, Possibilities, imagination! But, honestly, still very impressed by the whole package.

Extended reading:
Multitouch Fever: http://www.the-demos.com/?p=139
Microsoft Surface: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Jeff Han’s FTIR: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
Diamonad Touch: http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch
Sony CSL Smart Skin: http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/smartskin/