Bill Gates unveils interactive wallpaper
Predicts all walls will become touchscreens
Wallpaper sales could soon begin sliding, because Bill Gates has forecast that touchscreens will feature on every vertical surface in every home in the future.
The Microsoft billionaire made the prediction as he unveiled Touch Wall – a vertical take on the infamous Surface touch-sensitive ‘table’.
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Touch Wall is essentially a 48in x 72in intelligent whiteboard with a camera beneath it to recognise a user’s finger movements. Users can access Windows applications through the digital drape.
Gates promised the device will be “easy to navigate”. It allows users to zoom in and move windows around in much the same way as Apple’s iPhone does. During the unveiling at the firm’s annual CEO Summit, Gates said: “When I say 'everywhere', I mean the individual's office, I mean the home, the living room, all of those things."
He stressed that the cost of the hardware isn’t that high - well not if your current account balance matches the GDP of Switzerland, perhaps - and that the quality of software is improving “substantially”.
Touch Wall is still at the development stage, but demo Surface units have already been rolled out into AT&T stores in the US.
COMMENTS
Windows? Walls? What's next?
Floors. Oh, they've already got plenty of those, just spelt differently.
Ray Bradbury predicted it first....
in "Fahrenheit 451," Bradbury predicted that at least one room in each house in his dystopic future would have all four walls set up as floor-to-ceiling TV screens. The only thing he missed out on was the Wii batons.
Oddly enough, Bradbury also in that very same breath predicted how people would come to prefer their virtual worlds to the living, breathing, flesh and blood company of their spouses, children, parents, neighbors. Remind anyone of Facebook, etc, ad nauseam?
C.S. Lewis, in his novel "That Hideous Strength," also had Merlinus Ambrosius predict what MIT's Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte called "teledildonics":
"On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust."
Sounds like a couple jacking/jilling off over web cams, perhaps with the assistance of servo-controlled Sybians and similar gear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
More bilge from BillG.
Actually, this is VERY Microsoft. Announcing something as new and innovative that has been around for years.
Bill Gates' "vision"...
... has been available as a real life demo in PANASONIC's Tokyo showroom for at least 4 years!
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/06/technology/personaltech/japanese_future.rb/index.htm
C'mon Bill, 640cm2 surface should be more than enough for everyone!
@paul
ironically, microSOFT has always been a good deal stronger in their hardware products than their software.
