Below The Surface: Microsoft Shifted Samsung LCD Product To Grab Name For New Tablet

At the bottom of the page for Microsoft’s new tablet Surface, there is an odd little note: “Looking for the Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft Pixelsense? Visit www.pixelsense.com“. Huh?

It looks like Microsoft’s Surface is not the first Surface to surface at the company. Before it, there was a large LCD panel, made with Samsung, which could be mounted as a table, or on a wall, that enables people to “share, collaborate and explore together using a large, thin display that recognizes fingers, hands and other objects placed on the screen.” The last update for the product was released at the beginning of 2011, during the CES show.

Customers for that version, Surface 2.0, included Dassault Aviation, Fujifilm Corp., Red Bull GmbH, Royal Bank of Canada and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.

Microsoft hasn’t necessarily discontinued the product but it’s currently done something kind of curious with it. In an Escher-like puzzle, the URL it gives for the product actually leads to a bing search page, listing lots of further links for PixelSense, the technology used in the Surface table.

One of those links explains a little more about what that is:

PixelSense allows a display to recognize fingers, hands, and objects placed on the screen, enabling vision-based interaction without the use of cameras. The individual pixels in the display see what’s touching the screen and that information is immediately processed and interpreted.

Think of it like the connection between the eye and the brain. You need both, working together, to see. In this case, the eye is the sensor in the panel, it picks up the image and it feeds that to the brain which is our vision input processor that recognizes the image and does something with it. Taken in whole…this is PixelSense

PixelSense replaced an earlier version of Surface, a clunky sounding implementation that needed cameras under the screens surface to sense and respond to stimuli on the surface of the device.

It’s not clear whether the new Surface tablet is using any part of the old Surface technology — although both are based on touchscreens, so far at the event in LA, nothing has been mentioned about any connection. We will ask Microsoft for more details and update as we learn more.

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