Tales from the Microsoft Surface team

There's a new blog coming out of Microsoft now called Tales from the Microsoft Surface team. Microsoft Surface, if you haven't heard of it, is new technology that can best be described as a really, really big iPhone. But with tons more functionality. It looks like it's about the dimensions of those old pac-man tables you used to see in pizza joints, but the whole surface is touch-sensitive...in fact, multi-touch sensitive; meaning that several people can be working on the same screen at once. The obvious uses are in displays, of course...I've heard speculation of map displays in airports and malls, casino applications, and informational displays in cell phone stores (place the phone you're interested in on the surface and it will detect it and tell you all about it).

Sounds interesting, but there's a lot of work they've yet to do before getting them really wide-spread. Eventually though, it might be interesting to hang one of these on your wall like a new TV and have Media Center and other Windows applications available, in a really big format, at the touch of the screen.

There's a great demo at http://www.surface.com: skip the intro movie, then click on "The Magic". It really shows you what I'm talking about.