Slideshow: Tabletop Computers

SURFACE COMPUTING 2008

At the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, bar customers can use the surfaces of their cocktail tables to chat and flirt with customers at other tables, design and order drinks, and play interactive games with groups of friends. In several AT&T stores, visitors can place a mobile phone model on a table to automatically bring up information about the phone’s features, or place two phones side by side for an instant comparison. And at the Innoventions Dream Home at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, the kitchen counter recognizes ingredients placed on it and suggests recipes for using them. This is surface computing, circa 2008. The technology, also called tabletop computing, seems to have come out of nowhere, but it has actually been brewing in research laboratories for the past 15 years. Watch a demonstration here.