What you didn’t hear about Surface

Microsoft’s revolutionary Surface, which will be forth-coming in selected markets (not consumer) by the end of this year, is the same concept as a counterpart you might not have heard of. Although Microsoft began developing the Surface system as we know it as early as 2003, the concept of projection / detection has been floating around; whether Microsoft may have leaked it is unknown to me.

The Multi Touch Console is an open-source project by a couple of independent developers in Berlin, and is pretty much a port of the Reactable (video), which has been around for a little bit now. The system, like Microsoft’s, features a projector, camera, diffuser, glass surface, etc., but the most outstanding aspect of this system is that it’s open-source and can be built from scratch. Go here for documentation and links of the parts.

If you want to see some more demonstration of what multi-touch can do, check out this video of Jeff Han demonstrating a multi-touch system.

This has very exciting possibilities in the music arena, as some of the videos on the MTC website suggest, although I feel the true possibilities of it aren’t drawn out as well in those. I think we’re going to see some amazing things when someone combines these systems with the open-source 64Step software for the monome 40h, as well as other sequencing software.

(Via Music Thing)