Objects may be closer than they appear
Even though I didn’t have the spare change this week to attend the D5 conference down in San Diego, some nice people did point out some of the salient details from today, and I’m impressed by what the future holds for me. In fact, back about five years ago, when Minority Report was released, I thought that science fiction had a certain cool factor going for it. Now, I believe that certain objects may be closer than they appear. Forget the substance plot. Focus on the interface.
Microsoft today presented the Surface. More than just a pretty face, methinks. Still a bit expensive to hide away in my basement, but maybe there’ll be an open source version that I can rig up with a couple of those spare webcams, a Bluetooth interface and a big army surplus version of a touchscreen. We’ll see what happens. Where was I? Oh yes, the new Surface project. You see, when “Bill” and “Steve” get into a contest, neat things result.
I’m a hopeless baby when it comes to new tech toys. This box will satisfy the gadget geek for a few hours. No more trying to find the missing cable that I need to do a file transfer; I’ll just set one geek toy on top of another one and see what happens. Wondering how that photo might look if I could rotate it a few degrees and increase it by 28.2%? Easy as waving my arms around. And wait until version 2.0 comes out in about eighteen months.
The real marvel here is that I could watch video footage, probably with a better viewpoint, that the attendees would have to wait to get home to see. The net makes everything happen here and now. No secrets in geekdom. Even if they paid the $4K registration fee, they wouldn’t have had a hands-on demo (would they? I’m not sure. Maybe I should be jealous).
