Microsoft demos 3D desktop with transparent OLED Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group has combined a transparent OLED display with an Xbox Kinect sensor and a smidgeon of software sorcery to create a space where users can manipulate on-screen objects at different depths within the screen. The team dubbed the process "view-dependant depth-correction gaze", and demoed it at …
Now I can look at my hands on the keyboard *through the screen*. My, isn't that useful. As a habitual touch-typist, I'm having some trouble feeling impressed.
Yes, they're having tons of fun with their kinect and the fancy fridge door. But advancing the state of the art? About as much as the same idea done in a table (that'd been done better before they did). Or 3d televisions. Or... oh who cares, really. I mean, what truly new does this bring that we couldn't do before? What does it enable or streamline or speed up or improve? Colour me a backward stick-in-the-mud, but I don't see it.
Lacking the marketeering prowess of redmond, you tend to not see them reported in the mainstream or even industry rags. Rather, you go look at various conferences where people show off their "hacker space" free time handiwork. At which point some rep or other sees it and possibly buys it, or more likely steals the idea and puts a big marketeering push behind it. The latter happened with "micros~1 surface". I'd been playing with various versions done by hobbyists at conferences (at one point a whole roomful) before that ever hit the industry rags.
So to me it was already old hat, and I'm by no means that well-connected or part of any in-crowd. What would've been useful was to commoditise it, make it cheap and easily affordable. You know, like they pride themselves on making tech easier accessible to the masses. Yet they didn't deliver on that. Instead redmond put it in noisy showcase boxes parked in libraries, as a philantropic advert for itself, and left it at that.
Most of this sort of thing isn't that new. Sometimes the tricks are well over a hundred years old, only done in shiny! new! technology, like this see-through fridge door. The problem is to discern whether it's truly useful or maybe just mainly marketing. If it's from a marketeering company, I'd say some scepticism is warranted.
I really have no idea about this particular thing, and maybe it'll be useful. When and to whom will it be available, and will it work with other-than-windows machines too, or will we be locked in again?
Apple possibly has something amongst the haul they got from FingerWorks — the latter was a gesture recognition company that specialised in multitouch but which presumably patented the gesture stuff independently of the specific technology.
Hopefully everyone will have had their fingers so badly burnt by the patent process by the time that this stuff is commercialised that it won't matter.
Hmmm... arguable really.
If the apostrophe is there to denote that the word "demonstrations" has been abbreviated, then it is actually quite correct.
If however it is mistakenly there to denote a multiple of the word 'demo' then it is incorrect.
So really - it's OK either way.
Surely unless you can touch type perfectly (For all keys, not just regular alphanumerics), there are going to be occasions when the onscreen pixels will block your view of the keyboard - ie fullscreening an app would be a no-no.
Either that or the (active) pixels would have to be translucent, meaning your image quality is pretty poor. Gonna be utterly useless for any kind of artistic work.
I think the transparency and having your hands behind the screen is a bit of a dead end myself. It certainly is never going to take off as the dominant form factor IMHO.
1) Too easy. Kinect. And that's just the one I *know* came out of MS research. Like someone else commented, the general public has no idea how much stuff actually comes out of there, and we probably never will. Yes, blah blah blah they bought a *part* of the tech from another company, not the whole damn thing.
2) No, but then again I haven't thought about it. I'm sure there are a *ton* of uses though, but what do you want to bet MS screws it up and Apple creates the exact same thing, advertises how it's actually useful for playing angry birds, claims that it's "innovation", claims they came up with it on their own and everyone else copied them despite this article and thousands of other sources proving otherwise, puts an enormous price tag on it, and gobbles up even more money from people that can't afford it, but buy everything from Apple anyway. It probably would be useful for CAD/Modeling, but it will never see the light of day because MS says "dur, we created something, someone else find a use for it".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
