Microsoft Research shows off HoloDesk | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Research shows off HoloDesk

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41 pointstamersalama14 comments

Wow, incredible! The only thing though is that I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to actually commercialize something like this, or if someone will swoop in an eat their lunch.

If I remember correctly, they had the multi-touch Microsoft Surface years ago, but I didn't see them produce anything, until Apple came out with the iPhone and subsequently the iPad. Now everyone thinks that Apple invented that user experience from scratch. Bill Gates has talking about tablet computing for a decade, but it was Apple that actually made it a reality.

I wonder if they will make the same mistake again with this amazing technology (although they did get out the Kinnect which itself is a sweet piece of technology in its own right).

I completely forgot about that interactive table thing 'til now.

iPhone announced: early January 2007

Microsoft Surface announced: late May 2007

iPhone shipped: end of June, 2007

Microsoft Surface shipped: mid April, 2008

(all according to Wikipedia)

In reading this I was curious as to why your timeline struck a note of discord with my memory banks. In particular, the fact that the linear ordering placed on my temporal estimates of when I became aware of the existence of each object as a notion was swapped with the implicated ordering you gave!

So I checked wikipedia myself and the history revealed that I was in fact not mistaken, wikipedia agreed with my dismal estimation of the past i call memory. the surface reached public awareness before the iphone =)

Over the next year, Microsoft built more than 85 early prototypes for Surface. The final hardware design was completed in 2005.

I suppose the lesson here is that a novel way of interfacing with something is not in and of itself sufficient without something meaningful as the product of this new interaction.

I am not claiming your memory is false (and I know my memory is 100% built on a Wikipedia lookup I did today), but I think that Wikipedia reference is mostly built on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/surfacecomputin.... That has a 2007 publication date. I also cannot find a link predating 2007 mentioning Microsoft Surface or its earlier name Microsoft Tabletop. Because of that, I am not convinced that Microsoft Surface "reached public awareness before the iPhone".

So, please educate me: where/when/how did that happen?

Here is an early prototype back in 2006.

http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-micros...

You really wonder why Microsoft has such a good Research Department, but barely anything useful comes out eventually into the hand of the user. They should really look into changing their cooperate structure

If they dont produce a consumer device they at least create a lot of patents.

This. I could easily see Microsoft Research existing primarily as a vehicle for patent licensing. I don't know if it would be self-funding but it would certainly offset the research costs. Almost seems like a business method patent idea: using a research department for the sole purpose of preventing competitors from implementing certain ideas. It would be a creative use for billions of dollars of cash that could only be matched by similarly sized companies.

>... what sets it apart from the rest is the use of beam-splitters and a graphic processing algorithm ...

Seriously? I've been seeing this exact same setup (minus the Kinect) for 3D interactions for a long time. There must be something more revolutionary here, this is barely news-worthy. The only thing I haven't seen previously is the fairly-bad object occlusion, but I've seen that in other demos years ago - all they lacked was the beam-splitter.

I saw a demo years ago that used a glove that provided some sort of feedback so you could actually "feel" the objects

What about Microsoft Research Stores?

http://www.wemakethingswork.co.uk/Site/microsoft_research_st...

cool, but I was more amazed by this one

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/surfacerecon/

Amazing. Elegant. Nothing super new, but a brilliant assemblage of existing research to accomplish something awesome.

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