Hats off to Microsoft.
We have been waiting for over a decade for a revolutionary digital home product. Five years in the making, and now the "Surface." Although comparisons have been made to the iPhone, this is clearly in another class. Again, taking product design cues from the movies, many bloggers are calling it "Minority Report" UI. It has always amazed me how much influence Hollywood Science Fiction movies have on CE product design. We truly live in a time where if it can be shown in a movie, there isn't much left to produce a prototype for real within a couple of years.
Now, of course, this is not new. There was a much ballyhooed demonstration of the multi-touch technology at the TED Conference in February of 2006. Of course, Jeff Han, being the academic he is acknowledges that they didn't invent the technology. Of course, there has been a multi-touch surface available to the digital music production community called the Lemur. Its manufactured by Jazz Mutants from France and it is the first product I came across that can actually respond to multiple inputs and apply math to the points on the x-y axis.
What does all this mean to home system integrators and their clients? That there will be some big demand for new UI that integrates all of our digital media. We have not seen Microsoft or any other multi national corporation for that matter be able to deliver this technology in the home without the integrator channel. We'll see where this goes, but rest assured, Vox UI will do its best to deliver this technology to anyone that wants to be an early adopter.
