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Asus Seamless Experience: Microsoft Surface knockoff, two years too late
There's something familiar about this interactive desktop that Asus showed off at Computex 2009 in Taipei. Let's see… the surface of the desk appears to be a large interactive touchscreen, able to interface with anything you put on top of it. For example, when it senses your cellphone, it'll call up your calendar and contacts on the surface of the table beside it. It can even tell you the temperature of that cup of coffee you just plopped down. Cool stuff, but I can't help but think I've seen this before.
Yep, this is just a ripoff of Surface, Microsoft's high-tech table that functions as some kind of all-purpose furniture-size everything device. Just like Surface, it looks totally amazing. And just like Surface, its usefulness is a complete mystery. Unlike Surface, however, it looks as though the objects placed on the Seamless tabletop need some kind of electronic contacts to interact with the table (check out the back of the hard drive in the video from NewGadgets.de above). Somehow I don't think the market for these things is about to explode.
Asus press release, via Engadget
By Old Man Dotes at 12:02 PM ON 06/15/09
Are you sure Microsoft didn't steal it from Asus? It's not like MS has ever displayed any ethics.
By Reactable at 12:39 PM ON 06/15/09
Old Man Dotes
I doubt it.
By Truth be Told at 12:41 PM ON 06/15/09
They both stole it from Perceptive Pixel. Or maybe Microsoft just bought the rights from Perceptive Pixel.
By Anonymous at 12:44 PM ON 06/15/09
http://www.reactable.com/ is a lot like MS Surface in terms of technology, and was certainly before Surface.
By Maj at 2:57 PM ON 06/15/09
Are you guys getting paid to rip on input technology in favor of Surface?
This is the third article I've seen today where bloggers on your network are ripping on input technologies that have features vaguely related to those offered by Surface.
Srsly, enough already.
By tali713 at 5:15 PM ON 06/15/09
You know I really wonder how much research the author puts into his articles. If he actually did research on the topic he would have noticed that the image on the back of the drive is not an electronic contact but is an image nearly identical in terms of style to those use on the Reactable mentioned by anonymous. This is probably indicative of a projector/camera set up similar to that used on MS surface and first widely displayed on the aforementioned Reactable. And to my knowledge this approach was pioneered by same.
By hclmed at 6:13 PM ON 06/16/09
Yes, these are optical, otherwise known as fiduciary markers that provide a visual signature to objects on the table. That's exactly what both the Reactable and Surface use.
By hclmed at 6:21 PM ON 06/16/09
DVICE captcha seems to be messed up. It rejects messages with correct responses with a redirect to the message : Text entered was wrong. Try again. Then it seems to post anyway.
By CS Guy at 8:00 AM ON 06/24/09
The one thing the Asus system has over Surface is that it is NOT made by Micro$oft, or micro-schlock as I like to call them.
Anything by M$ will be designed from the ground up to crash constantly and be prone to virus infection, use double the system resources really needed and still be slow as molasses.
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