Microsoft PlayTable Expected Soon

Okay, I must be really out of touch or this stuff just isn’t hitting my radar screen as something that’s going to immediately impact my life. Have you heard of Microsoft’s PlayTable?

As usual Mary Jo Foley gets me the scoop on this bit of information.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also provided a PlayTable-related technology demo during his Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote address in 2006, when he placed a cell phone containing digital photos on a tabletop device and all the pictures “flew out of it” and could be manipulated by touch and gestures. Microsoft has shown similar surface-computing-type demos at a handful of other conferences and events.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool, but someone explain to me the “flew out of it” part. Are we talking 3-D holograms here? It appears that’s somewhat of exactly what we’re talking about as well as it coming from the same folks who work on the Xbox and Zune. I’ve got to tell you, that makes me feel better because I have been pleased with those two devices.

“PlayTable” seems to have evolved from two other technologies that Microsoft has been working on called Touchlight and PlayAnywhere.

I’m imagining Touchlight as the technology behind what we appeared to have seen in Minority Report and other similar movies where data is being manipulated in a 3-D space on screen via a glove attached to the user. I’m guessing the PlayAnywhere is more like the little holographic game of chess that Chewbacca was playing on the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars.

PlayAnywhere is, according to Microsoft’s description, a “compact interactive tabletop projection-vision system.” Microsoft’s PlayAnywhere prototype includes a projector, camera with infrared pass filter and infred LED device. Microsoft showed off a PlayAnywhere-type demo during a keynote by Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles in mid-May 2007.

But all of that brings us back to my original question, why haven’t I heard of this before? It could just be that I’m out of the loop on where these things were brought up or I was asleep at the wheel that day or just busy head down working in Microsoft Office or Visual Web Developer Express. It sounds good and all, but I don’t foresee me using any real-world application of this stuff for a number of years, and by then I’ll probably have to have my son explain it to me.

Photo Credit: Technovelgy – where science meets fiction