SurfaceComputer There's been a lot of things floating around on the net recently about multi-touch displays and the new interface design that it's going to enable.

Movies like Minority Report and The Island have set expectations about how a multi-touch wall-screen or table interface should work

Now Microsoft have delivered a real world product. At various stages in its life it's been know as Play or Milan and has combined technology from Microsoft Research, the hardware group and the WPF team.

Visit the official site, and have a look at a 15 minute walk-through to see the power at on10.

Initially the hardware is going to appear at a number of partners including Sheraton Hotels and T-Mobile stores, but expect to see them turning up at technology and entertainment shows and when the volume ramps up ... a store near you ;)

The Microsoft Surface platform runs Vista with most of the UI developed in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation - the big brother of Silverlight). It uses a set of cameras sensing differences in Infra Red light to track objects on the surface and a DLP projector under the diffuser to project the images that you see and interact with.

Wonder what the processor specs are on this machine?

Amazingly people have already started to reproduce the Surface UI using Silverlight!

Update: A fairly detailed overview from Popular Mechanics with a couple of great videos showing Surface in action.