Microsoft announced their first sand table for grown-ups yesterday. The web site is all Flash, so that's an immediate black mark against it (I first thought it was called "buffering").

There have been several demos of this kind of technology on the web in the past few years. That it has taken six years to get from the technology demos that I have seen to this current technology demo is amazing. The original iPod was done in six months and the iPhone in two and a half years. Six years is two technology generations at least.

The real deal-killer is its fundamental ergonomic problem: you can't get your legs underneath it. The original product idea (see the pencil drawing in Origins on the web site) was just like a sand table -- deeper than a table but not uncomfortably so. But this one is a bath tub with a screen on top, so users either suffer from gorilla arm or dinosaur back. The people who are using it in the PR are grinning relentlessly to cover up the pain from their sore arms and aching backs.

A tabletop is actually a pretty bad environment for sharing and collaboration. It has no defined orientation. This means that you have competition among participants who try to out do each other in defining "up". The winner ends up with a haggle of people on their side and the losers are left to mentally rotate everything they see from their respective geometric wastelands. Even without the orientation problem, each participant also gets a different perspective and the table space becomes a hoarding area close to the dominant people. There is a reason we use whiteboards and computer screens in a vertical orientation: they are naturally placed, allow large audiences to share and view information comfortably, and don't suffer from the same degree of competition.

I suppose that the reason for the bath tub design is that there is a camera underneath (and possibly lighting and projection too) that is used to track the movements and recognize objects. The better approach is to build the light sensors into the screen as Apple has patented. The large depth quite substantially limits the places that the device could be used if it were wall-mounted. It simply has to be built in to a structure or mounted on its side like a huge CRT TV. Another challenge for any stand-alone device like this is getting power and data in and out. There will either have to be built-in power, or somebody gets the side with the wires. Venting the heat means that if the top is cool, someone gets warm air blowing at their legs. At least wireless links will rid it of the problem of networking.

Like the Segway, it's cool technology and well-implemented for some very limited applications. But also like the Segway and despite the maker's ideas, it won't change the way almost anyone does anything.

Tags: Microsoft, Segway, Coffee Tables, Pigs With Lipstick, Multitouch, Gorilla Arms, Dinosaur Back