Bathiche spoke about the Milan project's evolution with the evident excitement of a man who's had to keep the most important thing he's ever done a secret for six years. Early designs of the table were displayed around the room as evidence of the product's long development cycle rejected shapes included "squashed white egg" and "podium." Steven Bathiche, research manager for the project, has been involved since the beginning (in 2001) when he and fellow researcher Andy Wilson first dreamed up the idea of a tabletop computer. If it seems as though the Surface machine sprang up out of nowhere, that's only because Microsoft has been unusually secretive about it. Its interface is the exact opposite of the personal computer: cooperative, hands-on, and designed for public spaces. And the Surface has the added advantage of a horizontal screen, so several people can gather around and use it together. Multitouch devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. It is an idea that has been floating around the research community since the 1980s and is swiftly becoming a hip new product interface - Apple's new iPhone has multitouch scrolling and picture manipulation. One of the key components of surface computing is a "multitouch" screen. Surface computing uses a blend of wireless protocols, special machine-readable tags and shape recognition to seamlessly merge the real and the virtual world - an idea the Milan team refers to as "blended reality." The table can be built with a variety of wireless transceivers, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and (eventually) radio frequency identification (RFID) and is designed to sync instantly with any device that touches its surface. The name Surface comes from "surface computing," and Microsoft envisions the coffee-table machine as the first of many such devices. I'm not often surprised by new technology, but I can honestly say I'd never seen anything like it. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it - just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone.
Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. For that matter, it has no keyboard, no mouse, no trackball - no obvious point of interaction except its screen. Surface has no cables or external USB ports for plugging in peripherals.
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One of Gattis's consumer pain points is the frustrating mess of cables, drivers and protocols that people must use to link their peripheral devices to their personal computers. He spoke in sentences peppered with "application scenarios," "operational efficiencies" and "consumer pain points" while he took me through a few demonstrations of what the Surface can do. He's a clean-cut fellow who is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars. The product behind the Milan project is called the Microsoft Surface, and the company's unofficial Surface showman is Jeff Gattis. Inside that room was Microsoft's best-kept technology secret in years. My hosts politely threatened legal consequences if I blabbed about the project to anyone not directly involved in it, then escorted me down a dark hallway to a locked corner conference room. This past March, when the project was still operating on the down low, I became the first reporter invited inside these offices.
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About 4 miles away, however, there is an unnumbered building that is decidedly "off campus." In that building, Microsoft has quietly been developing the first completely new computing platform since the PC - a project that was given the internal code name Milan. The Microsoft Visitor Center, for instance, is in Building 127, north campus, while the Microsoft Conference Center is in Building 33, just down the road from the company soccer and baseball fields. To make sense of it all, you have to navigate by numbers. Microsoft's corporate campus is a sprawling affair, with more than 100 buildings scattered over 261 acres. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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