BoxCar_Willie;1478574; said:
About 10 years from now when these kind of games come to the market en mass is about the time I hang it up. Looks cool but way too complex.
Microsoft's Surface table has been commercially available for about two years, and by late-2010 it should be cheap enough to begin making inroads into our daily activities. Upscale bars/restaurants will have these sooner than we imagine, I think. Just consider all the possibilities!
One of the demos MS has done with Surface is recognize a type of wine based on the color of liquid in a wine glass that is set upon the table, then present dinner menu options appropriate for that style/color of wine. Another application would be measuring the amount of diffuse light that makes its way to the base of a glass or bottle, then have the table itself page a waiter/waitress to bring your table the appropriate refills.
The use of Surface for gaming is a given. One of the first games written in-house at MS was a pinball sim (and in five years it'll be far cheaper to make video pins using surface than real electro-mechanical pins -- and forget maintenance!).
I know GDC and E3 and so on are venues for showing off concepts and visions for future products that may be years, or decades, off. But the fact that Ubisoft already has a finished game for current consoles that was clearly designed with an eye towards Surface as an input suggests they think the price will drop relatively quickly.
I did a little more reading and found that MS does have 30" Surface cocktail tables for
only $12,500 now ($15,000 for the complete dev kit), so the price has already dropped by nearly half in just the past 18-24 months since I last followed this.
It's amazing tech. Well, frightening really, once you think about applications like this and the possibilities of it combined with Natal. MS has been out hiring up the brightest minds in academia. I mentioned in the Natal thread that they brought in Johnny Chung Lee, and the consultant to Spielberg on applications for
Minority Report is now on the Surface dev team.
