As much as I love the Surface, I sincerely hope the government doesn’t buy one, and instead spends their money on doing something useful, like ensuring every peak hour train has eight f—king carriages. Honestly, how can they justify even contemplating the Surface when our public transport system is worse than some third-world countries.

Anyway, according to the article, the Government is looking for “innovative ways to store, share and analyse government information”. Like claiming copyright on train timetable info and blocking third-party apps? No?

Sorry, I’m just a bit over Cityrail at the moment. But you should read the ITNews article anyway.

[ITNews]

Running on what looks to be a Microsoft Surface the Reactable, Infractor is software that represents all of the New York Times as a streaming beam of light, with individual stories floating through the stream like fireflies. Placing an interactive prism on the table splits this beam, allowing you to assign filters like “Obama” to make the stream more relevant. (A jog wheel, placed next to the prism, can alter the prism’s specific sensitivity.)

Eventually, you’ll tailor the beam to only hold topics you’re interested in. Well that, or you’ll remember why the printing press doesn’t use prisms to convey information.

[Infractor via notcot]

For thousands of years, none of us quite understood the point of the Surface. Then, a few Carnegie Mellon students armed with but blades and wits developed this D&D game, and they lightning bolted the naysayers away. [Microsoft via Kotaku]

Since publishing the first leak, several more people have come forward with details on the Courier project.

This video is produced by the same firm that collaborated with Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios on the previous clip, and it walks through a slightly different (and more conservative/realistic) iteration of the Courier interface. While the first video showed a handful of use cases, this one actually provides an overview of the interface and Courier’s features, and more of how you would actually use it if you are not a designer.

The heart of Courier appears to what’s called the “infinite journal”, which is what it sounds like: A journal/scrapbook that is endless, bound only by storage constraints (presumably). Hopefully they will call it something less awkward. The journal can actually be published online, and it’s shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There’s also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.

This interface does share a few things in common with the other one: In particular, the hinge between the screens is still used as a pocket to “tuck” items you want to move from one page to another. It also still revolves almost exclusively around using the pen for input: In four minutes of video, there’s not a virtual keyboard in sight. Fingers are still used just to navigate, through flicks, swipes and pinches.

The interface has a few more traditional elements than the first video, with more of a Microsoft feel (fonts and titles bars) and less of the entirely handwritten journal aesthetic: a smart agenda, more defined folder system, universal search and multi-page web browsing. It feels more evolved and fined, and less convoluted, suggesting it’s more recent.

It also begins to bring into focus Courier’s priorities, and possible limitations: Other than the brief glimpse at the library and the web browser, there is basically nothing about viewing content, like watching movies, reading books, or listening to music. Courier, in this iteration, appears to be all about creating and writing with a pen, which is vastly different from what everybody expects out of the Apple tablet.

We expect to have more a in-depth breakdown of the Courier interface in the next few days, so stay tuned.

You may remember, Bill Gates was a loyal tablet user for years (and he still uses one). He was such a fan, in fact, that back in 2001 Gates told CNN, “The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it…It’s a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

Obviously, Gates was wrong—at least about the timeline. It’s seven years later and tablets are all but dead while netbooks and touchscreen smartphones thrive. Keep in mind that multitouch wasn’t around yet, though the idea of smudging up your computer’s screen probably didn’t make much sense given that a stylus was the ideal means for navigation.

Microsoft has since dialed back their enthusiasm on the tablet form factor, but you can see its spirit live on in products like the Surface and Windows 7’s multitouch support.

To me, the question is not so much whether or not tablets are capable of succeeding in the marketplace but how they’ve captured the imaginations of Bill Gates, Apple fanboys and Star Trek alike yet still managed to elude mainstream popularity. [CNN and Image]

After Mariner 3 failed to take images because of a hardware problem, Mariner 4 became NASA’s next big hope to get images of the Red Planet. There were going to be ten Mariner missions, but they wanted these badly.

The spacecraft did its first flyby on July 15, 1965, at 00:18:36 UT. It took 21 pictures alternating green and red filters, which were saved to tape. Then, the probe went behind the planet and the signal was lost. Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, waited impatiently, listening to static as Mariner 4 travelled fearless across the dark side of Mars.

At 03:13:04 UT signal was reacquired. All systems were nominal, cruise mode was re-established, and transmission of the images started 8.5 hours later. It lasted until August 3.

The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn’t wait for them to be processed by the lab’s imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and colour them with pastel crayons.

I don’t know about you, but I like the crayon version better than the actual image. [Images from the Data+Art exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, co-curated by Dan Goods]

XUI, or experience-user-interface, is Microsoft’s anticipated evolution of the NUI, or natural user interface (a la Surface). What’s that really mean? It means something amazing—essentially computers/life rethought.

Keep in mind, these two concept videos are not necessarily grounded in actual technologies that we have today, but were produced to “explore in a poetic narrative way how certain developing technologies could begin to blend and augment our daily lives”.

The first clip is my personal favourite, as I love the idea of ordering a piano on my computer and watching it drop from my ceiling. But the second clip chooses a bit too much style over function for my taste. Do I really want information I’m looking for spilled across my desk like a spilled deck of cards?

*Keep in mind that both clips are available in YouTube HD, so you might not want to watch the embeds as they are. [i started something via SlashGear]

Surface is a triumph of Microsoft usability and design. It’s a multitouch table computer. Minority Report! And so on. Setting it up, however? Ominous foreshadowing: It comes with a keyboard and mouse.

Gordon recounts the entire painful process in excruciating detail. Like, I got a headache reading it. It took 30 minutes to figure out where it plugged in—the most basic of all setup maneuvers—which required reading three manuals and calling tech support, who didn’t know where to plug it in either.

Okay, it’s up and running. Time to configure it. Logically, you can set everything up on the touch screen, right? I mean, it’s a touch computer. After five minutes of fruitless poking, Gordon’s crew realised maybe the mouse and keyboard were included for a reason—you need them to do the initial Surface set up. And after getting it to the point they could interact with it, another hour still was needed to finish setup.

At last, they finally got to the “truly dynamic and stunning user experience on the Surface.” Philosophical question: Is an incredibly usable and fantastic product really those things if the process of getting it to that point is a nightmare? Sub-question: Is setting up a Surface really that hard? Or were Gordon and his people just horribly deficient human beings? [Kinesis Momentum]

Utilising an array of infrared LEDs around the table, the guts of a PS3 Eye camera, a projector and some acrylic for the multitouch setup—along with a homemade wood cabinet and an old PC they had lying around (Core 2 Duo, 2 gigabytes RAM)—they fashioned together a multitouch beast for $US350 that more or less mimics the surface experience.

The video runs through some of the demos available, which includes an ambient light/finger paint type program that can track all 10 fingers, a Pong-like game, and the usual photo shuffling, it’s evident this was no half-baked project.

The project took a total of two weeks, and utilizes all open source software (Touchlib, AMCap, FlashOSC) to power the machine. For the entire lowdown (and tons more pics) on how this was constructed, definitely check out the post over on [Maximum PC].