![]() 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. 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. 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. Microsoft's corporate campus is a sprawling affair, with more than 100 buildings scattered over 261 acres. Three more than 70″ big multiuser touchtables present informations and interactive animations about three important historical cultural phases in the region: Hallstatt-time (pre-roman iron age), women cult at the Frauenberg and Flavia Solva, an ancient roman colony.Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Three multiuser tables with historical content The infosystem is also supporting fiducial-based tracking to administrate the table. Main attraction is a 62″ big Multitouch-Multiuser Gaming Table for children: the bilingual multitouch interface allows four or even more users to solve country- and picture puzzles and thus to follow in the footsteps of a local globetrotter named Bruno Baumann, who has travelled a lot in Asia. The exhibition concept makes use of a lot of diverse audiovisual and interactive multimedia technologies for information communication, which have been provided by us as turnkey dynamic database-driven exhibits and are controlled using a dedicated show control system for easy administration by non-experts. The REGIONEUM – a former renaissance castle – is the central point of information for visitors of South Styria: 1.000 sqm exhibition space familiarize the visitor with the cultural and natural diversities of the region. ![]() On June 27th, 2009 the Nature Parc Centre Grottenhof – now called REGIONEUM – in South Styria /Austria opened its doors to the public. ![]()
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