Many science fiction films have depicted powerful computers that are no more than large touch-screendisplays. In "Star Wars," it was a series of transparent room partitions with schematics used to plan and monitor a battle out in space. In "Star Trek," it was entire wall panels and tabletops for controlling everything on the spaceship. Today, here on Earth, Microsoft Surface is beginning to turn these sci-fi wonders into a reality.
Surface is a platform, or combination of hardware and software technologies, designed to work as a collaborative touch-screen interface for multiple simultaneous users.
The earliest ideas that led to Surface originated at Microsoft back in 2001. At that time, researchers envisioned an "interactive table" that could sense the presence and movement of any objects on its surface. Microsoft founder Bill Gates encouraged the project in early 2003. After 85 prototypes, the project team came up with a design that would eventually become Surface 1.0.
Microsoft first demonstrated Surface at the 2007 All Things Digital (D) conference in Carlsbad, California. During that D conference, known as D5, Surface was far from the first platform making use of touch-screens. Tablet PCs, for example, could already detect a finger or stylus writing directly to the screen. Microsoft's vision, though, has been to expand on that touch-screen approach to change the way people interact across the table from each other. The Surface device demonstrated at D5 was a black tabletop with a 30-inch (76.2-centimeter) touch-screen mounted beneath its clear acrylic surface [sources: Fost, Microsoft, All Things Digital,].
