6 ms·

Microsoft gears up to mass produce large-screen touch displays

43 points by funkyy 12y ago

dang 12y ago
Url changed from http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-produce-its-big-ass-touchscreens/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-produce..., which points to this.
fleshweasel 12y ago
Looking cool in movies and in corporate and university lobbies is not enough. Microsoft really needs to cut the shit and start focusing on producing a product that's actually desirable to a wide market--something they've only gotten worse at in the last few years, outside of their programming languages.
- ahelwer 12y ago
  (Disclaimer, msft employee) The surface is legitimately useful as a complete replacement for paper & pen. I never even touched looseleaf during my last semester at university. Plus the pro 3 has a large enough screen to make it useful for coding.
  - phaus 12y ago
    I agree. The only thing preventing the Surface Pro from becoming wildly popular is the price. Its definitely worth the price, and I may end up with one myself, but most people simply won't spent that much on a computer. P.S. You guys should really make a legit keyboard dock like the clam case or the transformer. People looking for laptop replacements don't like balancing shit on their laps.
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      You can get a Surface Pro 3 for $799, if anything that's a bargain for what you're getting. I wouldn't be surprised if MS had negligible or even negative margins at that price. The only danger about that price point is that people might think it's an expensive tablet rather than a cheap computer.
      - intended 12y ago
        Very likely negative margins. The product was best summer up to me so: "if you want a heavy tablet which can sorta be a laptop, surface is ideal. Otherwise if you want the robustness of a laptop and occasional tablet use, try a yoga." Having used both, the yoga turned out to be the superior use case when I wanted a stable and robust screen. If I wanted to sketch something, I wish I had a pro 3. For me, and I suppose many other users - it's coming down to broadwell and the surface 4. (Or if they want to branch out with accessories, a stronger and more robust keyboard accessory) But the device does cram an awful lot into its chasis. No matter what, MS did a good job on the design.
      - phaus 12y ago
        >You can get a Surface Pro 3 for $799, if anything that's a bargain for what you're getting. Like I said, its worth the money for what you get, but that's not going to matter much. Most people spend less than $799 on a computer of any sort. >The only danger about that price point is that people might think it's an expensive tablet rather than a cheap computer.. Until they release a keyboard that actually transforms the device into a laptop, it is just an expensive tablet.
  - eruditely 12y ago
    I am interested to hear how you utilize the surface for a pen and paper replacement. I want something portable that works for a notebook, but I don't see it replacing a laptop for me. Care to expand?
    - ahelwer 12y ago
      Surface pen + OneNote is pretty magical. It's the first thing I show people when they ask to try my surface, and they're always blown away. So basically I just write on there instead of using paper & pen. As an aside, I also like using the pen to draw diagrams for presentations, instead of using Visio or whatever. People pay more attention to the hand-drawn look, I find.
    - algorithmsRcool 12y ago
      I'm a few hours late but, just last night, i woke in bed and stared at the ceiling for a while then had a thought about a a particular issue at work. Being able to just roll over and sketch it out in 4 colors for clarity in onenote without having to fiddle with the bedroom light made me consciously think about how much i liked my surface. More practical usage involves me capturing meeting notes at work with it. To be honest were it not for the great pen capabilities and the great onenote app, i wouldn't be using the device at all probably.
  - Retric 12y ago
    The surface completly misses the point of a tablet. It's a laptop with an odd form factor. But an ideal tablet is under 2/3 pound and all other features are optional.
userbinator 12y ago
I don't see large touchscreens being suited for anything other than whiteboard replacements and maybe exercise games - the amount of effort needed to interact with one that's much larger than a typical tablet (~12") becomes tiring quite quickly. In comparison, traversing a large screen with a mouse requires not much more than a small wrist movement.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Tables only made sense if they were used collaboratively, which is why I think that is why early Classic Surface focused on that. We have tables you can write on with a marker, I don't see why, if cheap enough, adding a digital layer would be unwelcome (but not yet, of course). Using a mouse with a very large screen is a recipe for serious neck strain. Sure, you can move the cursor quickly, but your head still has to track it. I know, I've tried!
- snogglethorpe 12y ago
  It's not going to make make much of a dent in the whiteboard market either, until the price comes down a couple orders of magnitude...
delbel 12y ago
Aside from some niche markets such as airport displays and kiosks, I think this is a bad bet on Microsoft's overall strategy. I don't see a demand for these systems anytime soon. Disclaimer: today I was in a meeting where the projector had a touch screen and we only used it twice in the meeting. Although I was 1200 miles away from the meeting room and thought it was cool, it really was a gimmick when it came down to it. We never used it. I can almost see how this went down in a VP meeting at Microsoft "We'll make bigger brighter display and corner the market!" Unless someone can point out a real problem they are solving here, I'm betting in two years we will see Microsoft abandon the platform and all of the developers who invested their time into this flawed vision.
- lightblade 12y ago
  Don't be too sure about that. I would much rather buy a touch tv than ultra HDTV for my livingroom.
- feadog 12y ago
  Something that's a standing desk/tilted drafting desk form factor combined with good palm/elbow/forearm recognition would immediately address the "gorilla arm" problem with such interfaces. Combine that with Reactable-style tool objects, and input from cameras and/or a Kinect, primarily in order to make the system "smarter" about how to interpret touch, and I could see some really revolutionary interfaces for applications that are amenable to a data-flow style model. (Applications where you have boxes connected by pipes/arrows to other boxes.)
eruditely 12y ago
I personally have been itching for an affordable touchscreen that I could do much with. I have needed a touchscreen to augment my work space for a while now. So here's a counterexample.
Renaud 12y ago
If the price is right, there could be a whole ecosystem using these big displays. Imagine every family owning one where they can easily access kids activity schedules, pin lists of groceries, track chores, to do litst that could sync with every family member's phone (for those old enough),... This could completely replace the fridge magnets and the pin board, and it could be an excellent way for younger kids to interact with educational content. It could also server as a communication point for younger kids who are too young to have their own phone/tablet, be able to call each-others under supervision, ...
- noonespecial 12y ago
  I love technology. I totally want what you just described; but if you don't have a "family whiteboard" get one now. Even if its just the low-tech kind with markers. I can't tell you how awesome it is to watch my (gradeschool age) kids sketch their ideas after being brought up with ours.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    I have a friend who painted an entire wall in his house with blackboard paint, to be used with chalk. It's actually rather gorgeous. The kid isn't old enough yet to draw on it, but we certainly had a lot of fun with it :)
    - k__ 12y ago
      The parents of my girlfriend just let her draw on the walls when she was young (<4). After the years it got hidden behind furniture, because she was so small back then and couldn't draw >1m.
- fsiefken 12y ago
  I already have very cheap 0.5 mm think foil i put on the living room door on which i write household schedules, chores etc for that week. Good enough and makes me less dependent on technology. Having such a display always on would take lots of electricity and would be distracting, the white foil doesn't have these problems and is infinately smaller and cheaper - it just doesn't have the intelligence (you probably won't need for this particular purpose)
niels_olson 12y ago
I was actually wishing we had something like this for our lego league team (team 2600 ftw!) It would be great for that sort of language. I just don't see hanging a $7500 display in my garage. However, if MSFT/PPI would like to donate one, we would surely find a place for them on our team shirt!
sneak 12y ago
How cool would this be for controlling a synthesizer/sequencer? Totally killer for arranging music visually.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  That's exactly what I'd like to do with it (although since I have a lot of hardware, I would also like Microsoft to fix its appalling Windows MIDI drivers, for God's sake). I don't see this being that affordable in the short term but I would absolutely love to work with something like this for both audio and video. I think there'll be plenty of demand if they can bring it in at a competitive price and it's sufficiently responsive. Of course it will be in niche markets at first but I have no problem thinking of use cases. My day job is recording and editing sound for film and when your timeline runs to a couple of hours with maybe 40 active tracks (and that's on a small project) then even the best control surface has trouble keeping up, you keep having to switch channels or pages to deal with all the virtualized mixer controls, plugins and whatnot - not to mention that that amount of dedicated hardware costs a fortune. A table-sized work surface with a good haptic grammar would make that jobs vastly easier. I imagine the same is true for anyone working in VFX with its similarly elaborate pipelines.
- saukrates 12y ago
  There's a demo of Deadmau5 using a similar technology to control aspects of his set: http://www.wpcentral.com/deadmau5-teases-software-project-microsoft http://www.wpcentral.com/deadmau5-teases-software-project-mi...
count 12y ago
Using a combo of two of those 55" PP displays at a MSFT meeting the other day was amazing. Drawing with the pens and being able to touch-interact with the screens as giant whiteboards, then click a button and emailing a pdf of the whole thing to everyone, while having PPT and Lync video conference on the other was simply awesome. I need that whiteboard capability. It's so much less 'janky' than smart boards and stuff (mostly because of the pixel density, the multi-interaction (pen is different than finger, etc.), and no projection required. It just feels natural/right - everybody loved it.
- endtime 12y ago
  How much of that is about the hardware vs. the software? How much of the positive experience would be preserved if you ran the same software on a Surface Pro 3 and just cast the screen to a large monitor?
  - fsiefken 12y ago
    I've not used one (sounds awesome and exactly what i want), but to answer your question perhaps it's similar to the difference between using a mouse with a monitor compared to directly touch interfacing with the monitor. For for example Vassal boardgame, for which I bought my Iyama touch monitor there is a real experiential difference between using a mouse and your finger for moving pieces. Less seperated and more natural.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    I feel allowing anyone on the meeting sharing the document and being allowed to draw on it from their seats would be awesome. Where I work, we use Google Docs to conduct meetings and on-the-spot polls with up to 30 people (more than that tends to block the document) on different geographic locations.
    - count 12y ago
      That sounds neat, but I'm a huge fan of pointing and moving around like a crazy person in front of the whiteboard :)
WalterBright 12y ago
What I've wanted for the last 35 years is my actual desktop to be a display.
- stinos 12y ago
  Yes! Although it would have to be tilted then, the far end of a typical 90cm wide desk is hard to reach, and probably just as hard to read if it would be a screen.
asgard1024 12y ago
Touch display? Nah, don't need it. But it would be nice if someone made a cheap netbook with a display of similar resolution that tablets have.
- gtirloni 12y ago
  I thought netbooks were dead. Is it about the price?
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    More likely they died unnatural deaths. Netbooks became a very price-conscious segment that cannibalized sales from higher-end ultra-thin notebooks.

43 points by funkyy 12y ago

dang 12y ago

Url changed from http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-produce-its-big-ass-touchscreens/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-will-mass-produce..., which points to this.

fleshweasel 12y ago

Looking cool in movies and in corporate and university lobbies is not enough. Microsoft really needs to cut the shit and start focusing on producing a product that's actually desirable to a wide market--something they've only gotten worse at in the last few years, outside of their programming languages.

ahelwer 12y ago
(Disclaimer, msft employee) The surface is legitimately useful as a complete replacement for paper & pen. I never even touched looseleaf during my last semester at university. Plus the pro 3 has a large enough screen to make it useful for coding.
- phaus 12y ago
  I agree. The only thing preventing the Surface Pro from becoming wildly popular is the price. Its definitely worth the price, and I may end up with one myself, but most people simply won't spent that much on a computer. P.S. You guys should really make a legit keyboard dock like the clam case or the transformer. People looking for laptop replacements don't like balancing shit on their laps.
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    You can get a Surface Pro 3 for $799, if anything that's a bargain for what you're getting. I wouldn't be surprised if MS had negligible or even negative margins at that price. The only danger about that price point is that people might think it's an expensive tablet rather than a cheap computer.
    - intended 12y ago
      Very likely negative margins. The product was best summer up to me so: "if you want a heavy tablet which can sorta be a laptop, surface is ideal. Otherwise if you want the robustness of a laptop and occasional tablet use, try a yoga." Having used both, the yoga turned out to be the superior use case when I wanted a stable and robust screen. If I wanted to sketch something, I wish I had a pro 3. For me, and I suppose many other users - it's coming down to broadwell and the surface 4. (Or if they want to branch out with accessories, a stronger and more robust keyboard accessory) But the device does cram an awful lot into its chasis. No matter what, MS did a good job on the design.
    - phaus 12y ago
      >You can get a Surface Pro 3 for $799, if anything that's a bargain for what you're getting. Like I said, its worth the money for what you get, but that's not going to matter much. Most people spend less than $799 on a computer of any sort. >The only danger about that price point is that people might think it's an expensive tablet rather than a cheap computer.. Until they release a keyboard that actually transforms the device into a laptop, it is just an expensive tablet.
- eruditely 12y ago
  I am interested to hear how you utilize the surface for a pen and paper replacement. I want something portable that works for a notebook, but I don't see it replacing a laptop for me. Care to expand?
  - ahelwer 12y ago
    Surface pen + OneNote is pretty magical. It's the first thing I show people when they ask to try my surface, and they're always blown away. So basically I just write on there instead of using paper & pen. As an aside, I also like using the pen to draw diagrams for presentations, instead of using Visio or whatever. People pay more attention to the hand-drawn look, I find.
  - algorithmsRcool 12y ago
    I'm a few hours late but, just last night, i woke in bed and stared at the ceiling for a while then had a thought about a a particular issue at work. Being able to just roll over and sketch it out in 4 colors for clarity in onenote without having to fiddle with the bedroom light made me consciously think about how much i liked my surface. More practical usage involves me capturing meeting notes at work with it. To be honest were it not for the great pen capabilities and the great onenote app, i wouldn't be using the device at all probably.
- Retric 12y ago
  The surface completly misses the point of a tablet. It's a laptop with an odd form factor. But an ideal tablet is under 2/3 pound and all other features are optional.

userbinator 12y ago

I don't see large touchscreens being suited for anything other than whiteboard replacements and maybe exercise games - the amount of effort needed to interact with one that's much larger than a typical tablet (~12") becomes tiring quite quickly. In comparison, traversing a large screen with a mouse requires not much more than a small wrist movement.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Tables only made sense if they were used collaboratively, which is why I think that is why early Classic Surface focused on that. We have tables you can write on with a marker, I don't see why, if cheap enough, adding a digital layer would be unwelcome (but not yet, of course). Using a mouse with a very large screen is a recipe for serious neck strain. Sure, you can move the cursor quickly, but your head still has to track it. I know, I've tried!
snogglethorpe 12y ago
It's not going to make make much of a dent in the whiteboard market either, until the price comes down a couple orders of magnitude...

delbel 12y ago

Aside from some niche markets such as airport displays and kiosks, I think this is a bad bet on Microsoft's overall strategy. I don't see a demand for these systems anytime soon. Disclaimer: today I was in a meeting where the projector had a touch screen and we only used it twice in the meeting. Although I was 1200 miles away from the meeting room and thought it was cool, it really was a gimmick when it came down to it. We never used it. I can almost see how this went down in a VP meeting at Microsoft "We'll make bigger brighter display and corner the market!" Unless someone can point out a real problem they are solving here, I'm betting in two years we will see Microsoft abandon the platform and all of the developers who invested their time into this flawed vision.

lightblade 12y ago
Don't be too sure about that. I would much rather buy a touch tv than ultra HDTV for my livingroom.
feadog 12y ago
Something that's a standing desk/tilted drafting desk form factor combined with good palm/elbow/forearm recognition would immediately address the "gorilla arm" problem with such interfaces. Combine that with Reactable-style tool objects, and input from cameras and/or a Kinect, primarily in order to make the system "smarter" about how to interpret touch, and I could see some really revolutionary interfaces for applications that are amenable to a data-flow style model. (Applications where you have boxes connected by pipes/arrows to other boxes.)

eruditely 12y ago

I personally have been itching for an affordable touchscreen that I could do much with. I have needed a touchscreen to augment my work space for a while now. So here's a counterexample.

Renaud 12y ago

If the price is right, there could be a whole ecosystem using these big displays. Imagine every family owning one where they can easily access kids activity schedules, pin lists of groceries, track chores, to do litst that could sync with every family member's phone (for those old enough),... This could completely replace the fridge magnets and the pin board, and it could be an excellent way for younger kids to interact with educational content. It could also server as a communication point for younger kids who are too young to have their own phone/tablet, be able to call each-others under supervision, ...

noonespecial 12y ago
I love technology. I totally want what you just described; but if you don't have a "family whiteboard" get one now. Even if its just the low-tech kind with markers. I can't tell you how awesome it is to watch my (gradeschool age) kids sketch their ideas after being brought up with ours.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  I have a friend who painted an entire wall in his house with blackboard paint, to be used with chalk. It's actually rather gorgeous. The kid isn't old enough yet to draw on it, but we certainly had a lot of fun with it :)
  - k__ 12y ago
    The parents of my girlfriend just let her draw on the walls when she was young (<4). After the years it got hidden behind furniture, because she was so small back then and couldn't draw >1m.
fsiefken 12y ago
I already have very cheap 0.5 mm think foil i put on the living room door on which i write household schedules, chores etc for that week. Good enough and makes me less dependent on technology. Having such a display always on would take lots of electricity and would be distracting, the white foil doesn't have these problems and is infinately smaller and cheaper - it just doesn't have the intelligence (you probably won't need for this particular purpose)

niels_olson 12y ago

I was actually wishing we had something like this for our lego league team (team 2600 ftw!) It would be great for that sort of language. I just don't see hanging a $7500 display in my garage. However, if MSFT/PPI would like to donate one, we would surely find a place for them on our team shirt!

sneak 12y ago

How cool would this be for controlling a synthesizer/sequencer? Totally killer for arranging music visually.

anigbrowl 12y ago
That's exactly what I'd like to do with it (although since I have a lot of hardware, I would also like Microsoft to fix its appalling Windows MIDI drivers, for God's sake). I don't see this being that affordable in the short term but I would absolutely love to work with something like this for both audio and video. I think there'll be plenty of demand if they can bring it in at a competitive price and it's sufficiently responsive. Of course it will be in niche markets at first but I have no problem thinking of use cases. My day job is recording and editing sound for film and when your timeline runs to a couple of hours with maybe 40 active tracks (and that's on a small project) then even the best control surface has trouble keeping up, you keep having to switch channels or pages to deal with all the virtualized mixer controls, plugins and whatnot - not to mention that that amount of dedicated hardware costs a fortune. A table-sized work surface with a good haptic grammar would make that jobs vastly easier. I imagine the same is true for anyone working in VFX with its similarly elaborate pipelines.
saukrates 12y ago
There's a demo of Deadmau5 using a similar technology to control aspects of his set: http://www.wpcentral.com/deadmau5-teases-software-project-microsoft http://www.wpcentral.com/deadmau5-teases-software-project-mi...

count 12y ago

Using a combo of two of those 55" PP displays at a MSFT meeting the other day was amazing. Drawing with the pens and being able to touch-interact with the screens as giant whiteboards, then click a button and emailing a pdf of the whole thing to everyone, while having PPT and Lync video conference on the other was simply awesome. I need that whiteboard capability. It's so much less 'janky' than smart boards and stuff (mostly because of the pixel density, the multi-interaction (pen is different than finger, etc.), and no projection required. It just feels natural/right - everybody loved it.

endtime 12y ago
How much of that is about the hardware vs. the software? How much of the positive experience would be preserved if you ran the same software on a Surface Pro 3 and just cast the screen to a large monitor?
- fsiefken 12y ago
  I've not used one (sounds awesome and exactly what i want), but to answer your question perhaps it's similar to the difference between using a mouse with a monitor compared to directly touch interfacing with the monitor. For for example Vassal boardgame, for which I bought my Iyama touch monitor there is a real experiential difference between using a mouse and your finger for moving pieces. Less seperated and more natural.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  I feel allowing anyone on the meeting sharing the document and being allowed to draw on it from their seats would be awesome. Where I work, we use Google Docs to conduct meetings and on-the-spot polls with up to 30 people (more than that tends to block the document) on different geographic locations.
  - count 12y ago
    That sounds neat, but I'm a huge fan of pointing and moving around like a crazy person in front of the whiteboard :)

WalterBright 12y ago

What I've wanted for the last 35 years is my actual desktop to be a display.

stinos 12y ago
Yes! Although it would have to be tilted then, the far end of a typical 90cm wide desk is hard to reach, and probably just as hard to read if it would be a screen.

asgard1024 12y ago

Touch display? Nah, don't need it. But it would be nice if someone made a cheap netbook with a display of similar resolution that tablets have.

gtirloni 12y ago
I thought netbooks were dead. Is it about the price?
- rbanffy 12y ago
  More likely they died unnatural deaths. Netbooks became a very price-conscious segment that cannibalized sales from higher-end ultra-thin notebooks.