Dr. Neil's Notes
Software > Development > Being Early
The Table That Changed Touch
Introduction
In 2008, I co-founded nsquared solutions around one of the more interesting problems in human-computer interaction: what happens when you move beyond the mouse and keyboard, and build software designed for large shared surfaces, touch, and gesture?
The early products were built on the Microsoft Surface Table platform. At the time, this was an extraordinary piece of hardware. A large, horizontal, touch-sensitive surface that allowed multiple people to interact simultaneously using natural hand gestures. It was the most direct, physical computing experience most people had ever encountered. It was also, at that moment, ahead of where the consumer market was ready to go.
The iPad arrived in 2010. By then, nsquared had been living in the multi-touch world for two years.
What the Surface Table Was
The original Microsoft Surface Table was not a consumer device. It was a large, purpose-built piece of furniture with a high-definition rear-projection system underneath a diffused acrylic surface. Cameras tracked touch and physical objects placed on the surface. The experience was genuinely magical the first time you used it.
The platform was designed for public spaces, hospitality, retail, and collaborative enterprise settings. Restaurants could use it as an interactive menu. Hotels could use it as a concierge surface. Teams could use it to manipulate information together in a shared physical space, without the awkward geometry of everyone gathered around a single mouse and monitor.
Building software for this hardware meant thinking about interaction in fundamentally different ways. There was no cursor. There were no right-clicks. There was no single user. Everything had to be designed for multiple simultaneous inputs, for screens that could be approached from any angle, and for contexts where standing was the natural posture.
What the Experience Taught
Building multi-touch software before the iPad era produced a set of design intuitions that proved enormously useful once touch became mainstream:
- Interaction needs to be forgiving. Fingers are not precise instruments. Targets need to be large enough to hit reliably without feedback from a cursor.
- Orientation matters. A shared surface has no natural top or bottom. Content needs to adapt.
- Collaboration is not the same as co-presence. Having multiple people around a surface does not automatically create a collaborative experience. The software has to actively support it.
- The physical and the digital can be combined in ways that feel natural rather than awkward, but only if the design is deliberate about where the seam sits.
These lessons shaped how nsquared approached every product that followed, including the work on Surface Hub and the later installations built for enterprise and public spaces.
Ahead by a Useful Margin
The gap between the Surface Table in 2008 and the iPad in 2010 was not large in calendar terms. But two years of building and shipping multi-touch experiences before the consumer world caught up was enough to develop an instinct for the medium that could not be quickly acquired by those arriving later.
When touch became the dominant interaction model for a generation of devices, the people who had been living in that world already had a head start that no course or tutorial could replicate. The early work was the education.
Part of the Being Early series.