Microsoft Surface cool software, incremental hardware

Microsoft Surface

This device is a pretty cool deal, especially the software demos they have for it.

When I first saw it this morning, I thought whoa… whats all the hype. This isn’t rocket science. The hardware to do this has been around for years, although perhaps not so much in real time on a consumer grade CD. Whats a little odd is the price, at $5K-$10K, they are either figuring on ultra low volume, or covering their R-D costs up front, at least as much as possible.

This seems a reasonable approach for a startup entity, but a little odd for a large company like Microsoft. I imagine its more to keep the adoption rates low, such that the program is manageable, rather than coming out at $1500, and dealing with production problems left and right.

I did a little more digging, and found Popular Mechanics has a diagram of the internals. Its well worth taking a look at, to see how simple the hardware actually is.