Overall, I thought the 'surface' demo videos looked very cool. However -
I also took them with a pinch of salt - I can buy the idea that you
could put a camera on it, and your photos would automatically download
from the camera to the surface. What I didn't buy was that it happened
in milliseconds - even over a fast wired connection it takes longer than
this!
But - to contribute to the more positive comments and possible library
applications, one part I liked was the two phones being placed on the
surface, and various bits of information appears.
So - how about a surface on which you place a book. The details of the
book come up next to it, and lead to search links (other books by this
author, people who read this also liked...) etc.
A nice way of combining the physicality of the book with a way of a
jump-off point for searching. This is stuff we could do with our current
systems/data, so it isn't future gazing - the difficult bit would be
getting the Surface to recognise what book was on it - but could be done
by RFID, so also technically very possible.
Secondly, how about representing books/journals on the surface with
cover images - and then allowing the user to open them, and browse
through. You could sort through books and magnify/reduce as demonstrated
by the photo functions in the demo videos. You could browse virtual
shelves, collect a 'Surface full' of books, sort through them and then
push the ones you want to borrow somewhere - perhaps to an e-book reader
(a la the music player demo) (if they are fully digital), perhaps to a
printer (for journal articles), perhaps to a request process (ILL or
shelf retrieval). Doing this in a library would be great - doing it from
home would be even better (if I start saving now).
I think the point of 'Surface' is not that it might replace your desktop
PC (I've no idea, but seems slightly unlikely for various reasons
mentioned by others), but that for certain tasks, the ability to shuffle
stuff about, sort through it, and 'push' somewhere is going to be
useful. For example, I think doing layouts for newspapers/newsletters
would be incredibly intuitive on this type of device. I'm less convinced
I'd do any serious typing on it - although if people can adapt to doing
email on a blackberry, as far as I'm concerned anything is possible ;)
I'm sure there would be issues (having used a Wii for the first time
last night I can say that it is unexpectedly physical - and it takes
some time to realise that you don't have to be quite as vigorous with
the controller as you would have to be playing golf/baseball/tennis in
real life!) - but we can dream of a future where computers actually work
as they are meant to can't we?
Owen
Received on Thu May 31 2007 - 11:44:54 EDT