We chatted about Simon, Newton, Spot, and the origins of touch interfaces. We discussed Kinect and the interactive poster advertisements of the future. Now, in the final part of my discussion with Microsoft principal researcher Bill Buxton, I ask him what the next big thing will be.
And he has an answer.
Are you aware of any relatively unknown technologies that exist now but are still waiting to be exploited in some new and popular way?
Yes. I can give you a really concrete one, and then maybe we can make note of the date and in three years see if I was right or not.
Back in 1992 I started working in Toronto on what was basically a drafting table. A big desk that was rear-projection and interactive with a three-foot diagonal display. It had a camera that recognized touch and a pen and so on and so forth. That work was consolidated and approved and in 2007 you saw it in something called Microsoft Surface.
Bill Buxton using the Active Desk he helped develop at the University of Toronto.
Surface is out there now. It’s in very small, specific, niche segments. The reason for that is the complexity of the technology and the cost of manufacturing. What it needs to work is such that it’s simply not suitable, even if was cheap, for broad audiences. However, it’s out there now while we work on perfecting it.
Right now it has five cameras in it and a projector and a bunch of other stuff. It’s just a lot. What will happen is that Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass. That will more or less be true. It’s not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself.
The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there’s a fourth pixel in every triad. So there’s red, green, and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff; go the other direction.
The way I talk about this is in terms of the paper cup walkie-talkies you make when you’re a kid, where you’ve got a piece of string and connect to two cups and you can talk to your sister or brother. The key message here is that you’ve got one Dixie cup working as both the microphone and the loudspeaker. The lesson is that if every acoustic transducer—which is a fancy word for microphone or loudspeaker—could be bidirectional, then why can’t every optical transducer—which is a fancy name for camera and display—be bidirectional? The answer is that they can be if you design them right.
The principle thing that we’ve been doing with Surface at Microsoft is that we’ve been making screens so they can not only emit light but also be like flatbed scanners. So if you put something against them they can see it at the pixel level. And what makes Surface different than anything else is that you can take a piece of paper or a magazine and hold it on top of the screen and the screen can read it, capture it like a scanner. Then it’s right there and you can manipulate it. It’s a really smooth interface between the physical and the virtual.
Right now we do this with cameras and all this Rube Goldberg kind of stuff. We needed to make something work so that we could live the future today. Meanwhile, we’re engineering it efficiently and refining it so that when we can make these things thin and cheap and reliable and robust we’ll already have had several years of experience with them and the software won’t be rushing to catch up to the hardware.
Microsoft's touch-screen table computer, Surface.
What I predict is that sooner than you’d expect—but longer than I want—these things will come in at really cost effective prices and will start appearing in people’s living rooms, dining rooms, game rooms, and so on and so forth.
And because of that bidirectional attribute and the fact that they’re horizontal, this technology will augment and enhance in a dramatic way the nature of games. It’s a very different thing to play a board game or checkers on a table like this. Even Dungeons and Dragons. You can have the whole table animated because the table can read the dice and recognize the characters and pieces. It will really transform the way we play games.
