Touch Computing Hits Its Stride

Microsoft's Surface and other touch-sensitive products can simplify complicated interactions, but are software makers and consumers game?

by Aaron Ricadela

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It's the computer that almost wasn't. Microsoft's Surface—a touch-sensitive table that could redefine the way people interact with machines—got its start in company research labs five years ago, though backers considered putting the project on ice several times.

Engineers wanted to build technology that would let users tell a computer what to do by moving everyday objects, such as a digital camera or a game piece, around the screen's surface. Yet some managers viewed the system as an unmanufacturable toy. "Probably every year I thought about killing it," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices group, picking over dinner at a San Francisco restaurant recently as he recalled budget meetings. "We struggled with the business model."

Microsoft (MSFT) has overcome many of those initial challenges. And the company intends to bring Surface, initially intended for niche markets including stores, casinos, and hotels, to consumers. Research into tactile, or tangible, computing is one of the most fertile areas of electronic-product design. The systems incorporate familiar objects such as toys, game tokens, cell phones, or wine glasses—and even substances like sand and clay—into the computing experience. By taking advantage of people's natural sense of touch and spatial orientation, the systems can offer more precise control over what's happening on the screen than pointing and clicking with a mouse.

Done right, tactile computing could help users design products, play games, and complete business tasks. Microsoft is working on a giant, 6-ft. by 4-ft. version of Surface that lets groups of four or six people gather around it to collaborate. Hiroshi Ishii, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, has designed systems that let architects shape landscapes and buildings using sand and clay, then see the results of their models on a computer screen. His Tangible Bits group has also devised a system that lets users move magnetic pucks to design cell-phone networks, and computerized animals that remember and replay the shapes they're twisted into. "Tangible Bits is an attempt to defy the gravity of the pixels," Ishii says.

Touch Pioneers

Apple (AAPL) has brought "multitouch" technology from its music-playing iPhone into its ultra-slim MacBook Air, and could in the future adapt it to specialized desktop computers. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Mitsubishi Electric, and IBM (IBM) have also done work in the field of tangible user interfaces. Anchors on CNN (TWX) manipulate maps, charts, and photos with their hands on the network's computerized "Magic Wall." And touchscreen technology for PCs is already showing up in products including Hewlett-Packard's TouchSmart PC (BusinessWeek, 6/25/08), which can recognize gestures like the flick of a finger for choosing albums to play or selecting photos to view.