Microsoft and Samsung Team to Create Star Trek Type Computer Console Board

Every day it seems we edge closer to display technology that movie-makers imagined years ago. Take those computer control boards that everyone on the bridge uses to run the Enterprise on the TV show Star Trek, and to come up with answers about planets and other beings they encounter. It seems we might finally be getting there. Microsoft and Samsung have together announced the Samsung SUR40 for the Microsoft Surface; a hardware and software computer table that not only reacts and displays information like a touch pad, but recognizes objects placed against it as well.

In practice the new creation looks like an old fashioned drafting board, meaning it's a table that has a back end that is a little higher than the front end, allowing for a surface that leans towards the user. According to Endgadget, that surface feels pretty much the same as an iPad, but the response is light-years apart. As just one example, Microsoft has written an app for the device that demonstrates the responsiveness of the table top. Touching the table top causes what look like tiny lightning bolts to be activated just under the fingertips. Pressing a whole palm against the tabletop causes the lightning bolts to form a storm of that follows the hand wherever it moves. Then touching it with a second hand, or third or fourth, depending on how many people are standing there, causes the same thing to happen at the same time. Thus, it's not constrained to just one touch mouse-mimicking activation. Imagine sliding two objects together at the same time using two hands, for example.

It gets better. Because it utilizes tiny lasers paired with each display pixel to read input, the table is sensitive enough to read characters on a sheet of paper for example, or all of the fingerprints on both hands at once.

It's not hard to imagine applications for such a table. Hotels and other service industries could use the board to book not just rooms, but services; customers could be granted access by an employee simply sweeping their hand from an image generated by a credit card, to an icon used to represent whatever is desired. Or those who steer large ships could use them instead of pedals and joysticks. The possible uses for such a device are limited only by the imagination. And price. The current bottom line model, which has a forty-inch diagonal surface area, runs to about eight thousand dollars, and that's without the custom software applications that unique customers would require.

Fortunately, such tables are directed at corporate customers with deep pockets, which means, we consumers may start seeing them in use in the very near future.