http://ohhello.tv/video/MS_Sustainability_web.mov

kinda neat... Gives a good idea of what AR might actually look like.

If Microsoft manages to actually do that in my lifetime I might like them again. Of course, assuming that someone else doesn't do it better first.

There's all kinds of power there, all kinds of ease of use, but all kinds of difficulty too. Simple is deceptively complex.

Then again they have got the microsoft surface. Now if only i could convince the college that they want to give us a grant for one of those....

Build your own. My school did.

(Ok, so the engineering college build a multi-touch surface, the computer science college programmed it and my college made a game for it--it also needs a stack of books to stay upright!)

indeed, a couple of ir cameras, a computer and a projector, presto...

the thing is basically a rear projection tv pointed towards the sky...

now, if they had tilted it maybe 45 degrees so that one could use it as a draft table style interface, it may make a bit more sense...

oh, and if microsoft builds anything, it will only work with other microsoft software, count on it...

But its so much easier to get the college to blindly shell out cash for "Necessary society purchases".
Its not as if they can satisfactorily explain to us how they can make a deficit when they have had INCREASED funding for 2 years, justify giving the president a 20% pay increase, raise the student fee, and refuse to let anyone look at their accounts (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

Well, the video is awesome and I imagine that we will get there at some point.

However, Micro$oft is evil and therefore, it won't look that great.

The elegance and purity of that interface style. That alone. That is what I want.

I see both M$ and Apple developing most of the devices shown in the video and then I see Google using Linux to make them better.

The first hurdle is likely high quality color Electronic Paper (of one form or another--electronic wetting is likely going to win out as it's fast enough for video and can do color).

as is always funny with these things, the biggest issue is power. the biggest single part of a portable computer, after the screen, is the battery.

but all these fancy cgi demos basically forgo the battery completely.

and i guess the best way to pull that of is by having the circuits harvest energy from the environment, heat, electromagnetic (that everything from light to radio and microwave), and storing it in some kind of nanotech based capacitor rather then li-ion or similar battery tech.

that, and getting rid of that pesky backlit lcd. its a energy waste like no other...

but to give it the fluidity of what we see on the video, we are looking at cpus that can outperform current day top of the line desktop cpu, but use less then a mobile phone on idle. and the storage must be ram like in load time.

i give it 20 years, at least. especially if microsoft is going to do it, as they have a bad habit of under-evaluating the needs of a piece of software.

If we can get full color 60+ Hz refresh E-paper then power for the screen is a non-issue. Even electro-wetting takes remarkably small amounts of energy, as I understand it.

20 years sounds about right for it to reach that level...

Of course 25 years ago the idea of a GUI was fantasy. 10 year before that the PC was a pipe dream... It might come sooner than we think.

That looks really good and it would be nice if we get something like this soon - but we all know how it is with shiny MS adds and the reality behind it...

Hopefully they won't be the first and don't already have patents or anything in this direction so other individuals and companies could do it faster and better.

What they didn't show was that it all ran on Vista and the endless blue screens and crashes that happen between window flipping.

Or work that well... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ohplease.gif)

That was very pretty and shiny. I like it.

I'm surprised at you M$ haters out there. If you wanted to be properly cynical you'd predict that, with our global economy falling into the crapper as it is, this vision of the future would never come to pass. We'll be bludgeoning each others brains out over a can of beans before too long.

Oh, come on. Microsoft is better than enterprise software.

Microsoft doesn't have the benefit of a hipster cult following, nor the excuse "dude, this is free" to cover their bugs up. I'm not experienced with Apple software, but I can be pretty sure that it still has problems that people sweep underneath the rug whilst continuing to rant and rave about how Apple is better than Microsoft, cures cancer and stops rape in third world countries.


Am I just a little bit bitter? See the Mac adverts for examples of why. When people are disparaged en masse by a corporation that is every bit of horrible as the alternative I get a little bit testy. Linux nerds are perfectly fine. Perhaps because they make up a large portion of my social group, and I agree that the free software ethos is provably good for the world.

That is a good video to show players to give them an idea of AR though.

It would be interesting to build a Grid electrical system that devices would use as you moved from place to place. Kinda like what Tesla wanted the world to be like. No batteries but power everywhere. Of course that is easier said then done, plus I can see the class action lawsuits already as new forms of cancer are created by all the free floating energy waves everywhere.

I would even just settle for having the datapads from Star Trek. A lightweight pad that grabs your personal data and has a sufficient sized screen.

there is work being done on something called magnetic resonance...

and if one could find a way to standardize it, one could have induction loops in tables and similar, for when you put down that data device on some random table to use it as a work terminal...

GM: "Its just like this, except instead of everybody being happy and friendly they are shooting at each other."
Noob: "Sweet!" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Hence the Horizon Marketing bit in the title description.

I'm sure if you turned on the Trid back when the Matrix 2.0 was first going online that's exactly what you'd see.

You can't really generate power effectively from background environmental levels of heat and EM radiation. Light you could do, but that requires a large surface area of PV cells, and still doesn't produce much power. In shadowrun, they explain it away by saying "nanotech" and doing some hand-waving, but that's because shadowrun doesn't have to conform to the laws of thermodynamics. While you are right in that power is a huge issue, what you think is the best way to solve that problem isn't really feasible, thermodynamically.

Someone probably did that at TED a year ago.

Though I am hard pressed to believe it is anything other than a metaphor given the source.