First peek at Microsoft’s multi-touch Sphere
The Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop reports about Microsoft’s multi-touch Surface Sphere, a spherical display with a lens at the bottom to project an image onto the internal surface of the sphere.
What does the demo show?
Interacting with photos The presenter pushes, drags, and resizes photos, same as in the multi-touch and table-top Surface demos. He also sends a photo to the other side of the sphere by pressing his palm on it—useful, he says, for sending something to a person standing on the other side, and for providing “pseudo-privacy” because the person on this side can’t see it.
Globe The Earth is shown mapped onto the sphere, an obvious and interesting application.
360 views The live video image from an omni-directional ring camera is shown mapped onto the surface, as is a virtual drive through downtown Seattle around Pike Place market using video taken from a moving car.
The presenter says that these provide an equally compelling view to everyone around it in high-traffic areas, but that “if multiple people want to interact with it, it becomes problematic”. He says you can socially mitigate those situations.
Pong Place your palm on the surface and a ball bounces off of it. The article calls this a game, but there’s no evidence in the video that it is anything beyond the ball bouncing off your hand.
Accessing a menu Press both palms on the top of the sphere and a ring of menu commands appears encircling the top.
Like the demo of multi-touch in Windows 7, this demo featured technology rather than user-focused solutions. Whether that technology is useful remains to be seen. Showing the Earth mapped onto the sphere is great, but a sphere seems a less appropriate surface once you’ve zoomed in.
Similarly, using the sphere as an interactive high-traffic kiosk would be problematic—only one person could be manipulating the display, for instance.
Microsoft’s vision of your next computer (NOT!) can also be used as a beach ball.
I suppose some geeks in a basement in Redmond mind find this kind of “Kewl”. I think the novelty would wear off REALLY fast, because, unless you are working on a small space, the ergonomics would suck.
stupidity at its best! who will ever need a sphere with images and having to use it with both arms all day? these multitouch large vertical screens are stupid because no one will ever stay hanging his/her arms to control the thing if he/she can control a mouse. Even the tablet never won the mouse for the same reason. All absolute position large devices will never rule. The opposite is true, this is why iPhone rules, because it is an absolute position small device.