Gates predicts wall-to-wall touchscreens

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 15 May 2008 at 09:35

Bill Gates claims that every surface will be turned into a touchscreen in the homes and offices of the future.

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Unveiling Touch Wall, a vertical version of Microsoft's Surface technology, Gates said he expects such "natural user interfaces" to proliferate in the future.

"Our view is that all the surfaces - horizontal surfaces, vertical surfaces - will eventually have an inexpensive screen display capability, and software that sees what you're doing there, so it's completely interactive," he told attendees at Microsoft's CEO summit.

"When I say everywhere, I mean the individual's office, I mean the home, the living room, all of those things. The cost of the hardware is not that great, and the quality of the software is improving substantially."

Gates claimed the "phenomenal" reaction to the early Surface devices has led the company to develop Touch Wall, a vertical screen that can be hung on walls in the office, shops or home. "This idea that you just sit there and interact, touch, you don't have to learn anything, that naturalness really draws people in," he claimed. "So, it's been a strong success so far, and that form factor is going to get cheaper and smaller.

"We're also going to have that in a vertical form. So, think about the whiteboard in your office becoming intelligent."

Gates then demonstrated the intelligent whiteboard technology using familiar Microsoft applications. "A PowerPoint presentation is slide by slide, and if something happens during the presentation, you want to skip around, that's hard to do," he explained.

"Here [with Touch Wall] we've got things laid out in this nice two-dimensional form. So, I can zoom in on anything, I can move around. I've got different types of information that I'm using here. And it's all just easy to navigate to, because at any time I can look at different things."

"I can even take and say if I want to ink on here, I just touch that, and say I want to circle this, say that's something important, and then when I go back to the presentation mode, as I zoom in and out, that's there just exactly like you'd expect."

Interactive whiteboard technology is nothing new: such devices have been in classrooms for years. What sets Microsoft technology apart is that the touch is detected by a camera beneath the 4ft x 6ft screen, and not with an electromagnetic surface or lasers to detect the hand or stylus movement.

Office and Windows integration

Gates said that although the Touch Wall technology is still in R&D, the company is already looking to integrate it into its next generation of software.

"This kind of whiteboard, with a little bit of hardware advance over the next couple of years, will not be an expensive thing, and that's why we're saying that it will be absolutely pervasive," he claimed.

"Already the Office group is thinking about what they can do in the next version that has built-in capabilities for this. In fact, the Windows group is also building it down at the operating-system level, so any piece of Windows software will be able to have this type of interaction."

Click here to see a video of the Touch Wall in Windows Media format.