« One Week From Now: SolidWorks 2009 MADNESS
Why Your SolidWorks Models Suck… Memory Out of Your Computer »

Microsoft Surface Goes Spherical. Better Curves for 3D CAD?

Published
by
Josh
on July 29, 2008
in Tech to watch
. Tags: , , , .

Hello! if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the SolidSmack RSS feed or to the free email updates. Thanks for visiting!

Isn’t display technology just wonderful? No? You want something curved? well, if you’re not happy with the flat Microsoft Surface with multi-touch, get ready to literally wrap your hands around the Spherical version.

Microsoft Research took the globular multi-touch screen out of the box today to reveal just how gaming, advertising and messing around with photos will never be the same. Of course, nobody think of 3D CAD when it comes to this technology. What could it change?

The hive gathers
I’ve seen design groups huddled in circular colonies around their workstations and people throwing paper back and forth between cubicles. It’s not like a ball with video on it can change much of how designers and engineers work, but think of the implications of what it could lead to. If you see that video, or 3D data, can be displayed on a spherical surface, what is the next phase? Could 3D data be the display and the information reside on those surfaces?

I’d like to get your opinion. Is new display technology a fad? Can it be developed to be more practical? I think it can be and I think we’ll be using 3D data in new and different ways in the near future.

Here’s the video:

Via Seattlepi

Related Posts

If you haven't already, consider subscribing to SolidSmack so you can easily receive updates when new articles are published or announcements are made.

Viewing 5 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I think this is a very impressive technological feat in terms of projection and user input. The applications that immediately come to mind are advertising and other public social computing situations. It does a great job of relating the user to things like Earth as a globe, but I'd like to see how that relationship holds up as you zoom into an area.

    As far as CAD, I'm having trouble seeing how it would benefit a user in a productivity sense. Your work space is decreased because you're only perpendicular to the image for a very small surface area. To see beyond that area you'd need to move your head or move the image. The surface's curve would also make it hard to visually see relationships between lines and surfaces, like whether a line is straight or parallel to another line. It seems like simulating accurate perspective would be nearly impossible because of the fish bowl effect.

    Of course, that's all short sighted and knee-jerk because a spherical display is a new concept to me, and I'm struggling to get past the experience I already have with a flat display. I'm looking forward to what concepts are developed. I think the REAL trick will be using a spherical display to "project" a 3D object within... using something like polarized pixels so you only see the pixels you are normal too.
    • ^
    • v
    Yeah Ocell, I always imagined it projecting inward to display 3D geometry and video. I don't think I'd be satisfied with a spherical interface, but like you say, it's a new concept to me.

    However, i can picture a concave display being much more useful as far as 'projecting' onto something.

    What I'm hoping will be recognized through this technology is that data projected or viewed on a flat surface limits use. The 3D geometry should be the surface.
    • ^
    • v
    I agree with Ocell; a spherical display has limited benefit to 3d cad - if you want stereo viewing there are plenty of useful alternatives. (some are even built into solidworks -wow!)
    • ^
    • v
    its pretty ironic that a lot of the cad bloggers are looking at multi-touch, when the guy behind a lot of this technology at Microsoft used to be the chief scientist at Alias back in the day.

    http://www.billbuxton.com/buxtonAliasVideos.html

    These used to be distributed by Alias on CD - yes, before dvds..

    Autodesk also has piggedback off some of the IP they acquired with Alias - they just made the Chameleon Boomcam thing public on their labs web-site (albeit stripped back to work with a webcam) that Buxton showed off in the late 90s, early 2000s..

    I'd say this spherical version of surface is all about Virtual Earth.. - that's be sweet - spin the globe, zoom in right down to street level..
    • ^
    • v
    wow, to think all the way back in 95 this type of UI was being conceived. Really makes you wonder about the possibilities they knew of back then and the people that have the knowledge now of what may be possible 10 years down the line.

    Thanks for posting that Al.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus