Lesson plan
Surface computer
A surface computer is a computer that interacts with the user through the surface of an ordinary object, rather than through a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or other physical hardware. The term "surface computer" was first adopted by Microsoft for its PixelSense (codenamed Milan) interactive platform, which was publicly announced on 30 May 2007. Featuring a horizontally mounted 30-inch display in a coffee table-like enclosure, users can interact with the machine's graphical user interface by touching or dragging their fingertips and other physical objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it. As an example, uploading digital files only requires each object (e.g. a Bluetooth-enabled digital camera) to be placed on the unit's display. The resulting pictures can then be moved across the screen, or their sizes and orientation can be adjusted as well. PixelSense's internal hardware includes a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, an off the shelf graphics card, a scratch-proof spill-proof surface, a DLP projector, and five infrared cameras to detect touch, unlike the iPhone, which uses a capacitive display. These expensive components resulted in a price tag of between $12,500 to $15,000 for the hardware. The first PixelSense units were used as information kiosks in the Harrah's family of casinos.…
Article summary
A surface computer is a computer that interacts with the user through the surface of an ordinary object, rather than through a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or other physical hardware. The term "surface computer" was first adopted by Microsoft for its PixelSense (codenamed Milan) interactive platform, which was publicly announced on 30 May 2007. Featuring a horizontally mounted 30-inch display in a coffee table-like enclosure, users can interact with the machine's graphical user interface by touching or dragging their fingertips and other physical objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it. As an example, uploading digital files only requires each object (e.g. a Bluetooth-enabled digital camera) to be placed on the unit's display. The resulting pictures can then be moved across the screen, or their sizes and orientation can be adjusted as well. PixelSense's internal hardware includes a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, an off the shelf graphics card, a scratch-proof spill-proof surface, a DLP projector, and five infrared cameras to detect touch, unlike the iPhone, which uses a capacitive display. These expensive components resulted in a price tag of between $12,500 to $15,000 for the hardware. The first PixelSense units were used as information kiosks in the Harrah's family of casinos.…
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.