Microsoft is going to debut its spherical multi-touch Surface next week at its annual Research Faculty Summit. We’re pretty curious about what you can do with a big ball of multi-touch (and wondering about the little things–is it a perfect sphere? How are you supposed to hold it? Is it like a globe?). They pulled references to it off the exhibit list (to keep it a surprise, probably), but it’s still very much on the floor display map, as you can see. We’re stoked. [Mary-Jo Foley]
USBCELL
Friday, July 25, 2008 at 10:57 PMThose designers over at Moixa Design who created the eco-friendly USBCELL batteries (http://www.usbcell.com) seem to be a few steps ahead of this with their ‘Spherical Display and Control Device’ patents US20070247439, that also covers multi-point/multi-touch functionality…
(http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=20070247439&FIELD1=&co1=AND&TERM2=&FIELD2=&d=PG01)