17 April 2009

Surface is an intuitive touch based interface that comes in table-like format.

Microsoft’s Surface promises to have a huge impact on the way people around the world use computers. Connections attended the European launch of Surface to find out more.

The technology industry is well used to revolution. The computers of today, delivering power unthinkable only a few years ago, have little in common with those of the past. The Internet–a minority interest little more than ten years ago–has entirely transformed the way the world works. Yet in one crucial aspect of computing, development has been relatively slow.

Since the punch cards of the 1960s, the typewriter-based keyboard has been the ubiquitous way in which human beings interact with their computers. The emergence of graphical user interfaces, and their physical partner, the mouse, made the keyboard only part of a chain, but it remains to this day a vital part of most computing applications. But keyboards are far from being intuitive devices–how much time is invested in learning to type adequately? – and nor are they ideal for the more varied computing tasks of today. What, then, will replace them?

As far as the IT industry is concerned, the answer seems to be touch screens. Touch devices have begun to appear in numbers, and, for many applications, offer the potential to make the user experience far more intuitive and straightforward. Though not itself new, touch has, recently, benefitted from technological advances that make the screens more reliable and lightweight.

Microsoft’s Surface product has its origins in many years of research. “The product originally came about as a result of a conversation in 2001 between staff from Microsoft Research and our hardware operation,” says Matt Champagne, Microsoft’s director of product management for Surface. “That conversation was about creating an innovative, easy to use and natural device for computing, and removing some of the barriers to using computers.”

From the start, Champagne says, there were four key tenets driving the Surface project. It had to deliver direct interaction with content, allowing users to grab digital information and interact with it through touch and gesture, as they would with objects in the physical world. It should be a multi-touch device, recognising many simultaneous points of contact with the screen and thus enabling users to do more than just operate it with one finger at a time, as is the case with most touch screen devices. From this multi-touch strategy came another key aspect: Surface was to be a collaborative device, allowing multiple users to work on the same unit at the same time. Collaborative computing has become big news in the connected world of today, but such functionality is about virtual collaboration, with each of us at our own individual devices. Surface was to change the way we think about collaboration, focusing on direct interactions between people in the same location. Importantly, the Surface screen has no top or bottom, rather being a full 360 degree user interface: this means that each user can use content oriented towards them. And finally, Surface had to blend the physical and virtual worlds in a new way, allowing interaction between digital content and physical objects.

Launched back in spring 2008 in the US, and already in commercial use in a number of customers such as Sheraton Hotels, Surface has just recently been officially introduced to the EMEA region; it is now available for purchase in 12 EMEA countries. And Microsoft is focused on getting the device in front of as many potential users as possible. “This is an experiential product,” says Champagne, who adds that the company is currently concentrating its efforts on a number of key verticals, including retail and hospitality, financial services, healthcare, education and the automotive industry.

Radical though it may appear, Surface is a Windows-based computer at heart, and, as with many of Microsoft’s business areas, the company’s huge partner ecosystem is a vital part of the success of the device. “We already have a network of 120 partners in eleven countries developing applications for Surface,” Champagne says. “Some of these are at proof of concept stage, some are in full development and others are just starting to come to market. It is very much a partner story. It’s a software platform as well as a hardware one, and we are producing an SDK just like we would for any other area of our business. It runs Windows Vista, and it’s based on the standard Microsoft stack–if you’re a Windows Presentation Foundation developer, you can easily develop applications for Surface.”

Champagne does acknowledge, though, that the unique Surface interface makes developing for the device a different kind of challenge. “The 360 degree user interface provides new problems for developers,” he says. “You have to think about the interaction model, and how you can create applications that work for groups of people collaborating.” Developers and user experience experts, he explains, can’t work separately as they might on other projects: the interface is so central to Surface that making use of it must be at the heart of the development process.

It’s easy to dismiss Surface as a gimmick, something that might prove to be important in time, but which at the moment is just a marketing tool for a research and development operation. But the speed at which the device has been picked up by leading organisations in a range of sectors gives the lie to that suggestion. Matt Champagne says that the commercial viability of Surface to potential purchasers has always been at the heart of the project. “Surface is a commercial product,” he says. “We know it is a great user experience, but that experience has to create a return on investment. And it does: it can drive foot traffic in retail outlets, and it can be used to create greater attachment to your brand among your audience. And it will produce cost savings, for example by using it as a training device, or to demonstrate complex products and thus reduce the requirement to carry inventory.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Microsoft Connections in Communications magazine.

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