Microsoft recently showed off a prototype of its Sphere computer at the company’s Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington. The Sphere is a multi-user system that combines touch capabilities into a ball-shaped display about 2-feet in diameter. The Sphere can be thought of as taking the Surface computer, introduced during spring of 2007, and forming it into a sphere.

Art Berman
Insight Media Consultant

The system incorporates a projector and an infrared camera in a pedestal base. The camera and the projector share the same optical axis through the use of mirrors. The projector sends images to the inside of the sphere providing a display with a complete 360-degree field of view. The camera detects when something touches the outside of the sphere.

Microsoft had initially pursued the development of spherical computer hardware through an in-house effort but eventually found it desirable to consider alternatives. To that end, the company chose to utilize technology from another company, Global Imagination (Los Gatos, CA; www.globalimagination.com). Global Imagination had already developed and was marketing a spherical computer display for applications such as museum exhibits and marketing displays. Global Imagination’s product is known as Magic Planet and comes in sizes ranging from 16 inches in diameter to one that is 6 feet tall (we first saw this product in a Barco booth at InfoComm several years back).

The Sphere effort at Microsoft began in earnest about a year ago. Microsoft researcher Andy Wilson had a demo unit from Global Imagination sitting in his lab when engineer Hrvoje Benko saw it. Intrigued, Benko went on to develop much of the technology powering the Sphere. This effort was substantial. Although Microsoft did not have to reinvent the display, it was a major undertaking to change the way the software both senses and renders content.

As an example of issues that had to be addressed, consider the fact that there are no straight lines in the image and that users do not move objects in a straight line so much as rotate them around the sphere.

Compared to a conventional flat display, the Sphere’s shape renders it less suited for some tasks and better suited for others. As an illustration of this point, consider just one characteristic of the Sphere: many people can simultaneously view and interact with the sphere-shaped display, each having a different, but equally valid view. At any given time, a person can only see just under half the screen. It follows, therefore, that a Sphere display allows a user to have a public section that others can see, but also a second side, for the display of confidential information.