Surface Computing Andy Lim, Derek O’Neill, Luke M

What is Surface Computing?  A specialized computing GUI  “Coffee Table”

Surface Computing in the Works  Microsoft Surface  Codename “Milan”  Use Cases  Photo sharing  Maps  Menus  Entertainment  Much more!

It is NOT just a Touch-Screen  Object Oriented  Multi-Touch Technology  Device Interaction

How does the Surface work? 1.Screen 2.Near IR light source 3.Near IR camera 4.Projector 5.PC 5

FTIR: The DIY version What if you don’t want it cost $10,000  Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy  Embed IR LEDs in the plexiglass  Things touching the surface of the screen scatter IR light towards the camera below

What do we do with the picture?  No preprocessing done by camera  Raw data analyzed on PC and run through an edge- detection algorithm.  Number of simultaneous inputs is only limited by surface area and computing power

The Brains of the Surface  Core 2 Duo  2GB DDR2 RAM  250GB SATA Hard drive  ATI X1650 Video Card  Windows Vista  Optimized for 52 simultaneous inputs  4 people with all 10 fingers plus 12 objects

What’s on the Surface  Radio Signals  Visual Marking

Using the Cameras  Recognizing Shapes  Very Imprecise  Algorithms for edge detection are expensive  Developer must specify shapes in every program  Mitigated if surface tells users what to put where, and then expects them to be there later

Using the Cameras  Tagging  Series of reflective dots identify object and orientation  Fairly cheap to process patterns  Universal for the entire OS, no need to rewrite IDing code  Requires tags be physically added to objects to interact with surface  Uniquely tags objects with same shape

Radio Signals  RFID  Use RFID tags to transmit information about what’s on the surface  Lots of things already have RFIDs built in (credit cards, room keys)  Surface needs to know what the data being received means  RFIDs use backscattering, so the position of the object on the surface can’t be determined

Radio Signals  Bluetooth  Bidirectional: Surface and Device interact with each other  Relatively secure  Can use Encryptable  Devices Identify themselves  Universal among mobile devices  Limited to 7 devices connected  No way to figure out position on the surface

What’s on the Surface  Radio Signals  Visual Marking  Edge detection on Items is great for finding positions of anything, but not great for identifying them  Tagging requires an up front physical action, but results in an effective way to identify objects and where they sit  RFID is a cheap, common way to transmit small streams of data, but its unidirectional  Bluetooth allows bidirectional access, but it’s significantly more expensive  Neither allow for items to be positioned on the screen

What’s on the Surface Figuring out how to identify objects, grab their data, and correctly track the on the surface is a very difficult challenge in surface computing.  Make the user tell you what something is when they place it  Create a place for the user to put something and track it from there  Tag objects, identify them at runtime and then follow the tag rather than the object  Microsoft is currently working on technology to match RFID tags with physical objects based on when the tag is read and what’s placed on the surface

Resources  RFID Design  Design.pdf Design.pdf  microsoft-surface-to-seamlessly-recognise-and-communicate-with-devices.aspx microsoft-surface-to-seamlessly-recognise-and-communicate-with-devices.aspx  Tagging      Bluetooth    Research   Home of the Surface 