Samsung SUR40 touchscreen table in video: Does it have legs?
Meet Samsung's touchscreen table, the SUR40. Could this expensive coffee table be the future of shopping?
Meet Samsung's biggest touchscreen gadget yet. The SUR40 is a 40-inch table so massive it puts even the enormous Galaxy Note to shame. Armed with quirky touch tech, Samsung wants to see one of these bad boys installed in every shop and business in the land. But does it stand a chance? Hit play on the video above to see me go hands-on.
The SUR40 itself looks like a honking great telly lying on its side, with four legs poking out the bottom to turn it into a massively pricey table. It's got a touchscreen that supports 50 different touch points, and uses an interesting technology -- dubbed PixelSense -- to do so.
Infrared beams are fired out through the SUR40's display, which bounce off your hands as they hover above the screen. This lets the system know where your hands are, and has the spooky side-effect of letting you interact with the screen without actually touching it.
The SUR40 uses Microsoft's Surface interface, which has been around for several years now. Something Surface can do is interact with objects, by way of Microsoft's own Byte Tag tech. These are pleasingly simple black and white patterns that the infrared tech in the SUR40 is able to recognise.
But at £8,000, this hugely expensive table isn't for the likes of you and me. Instead Samsung's hoping that companies will fork out cash to install these pricey machines in shops and businesses.
Imagine strolling into a shoe shop and checking your size by slapping your feet onto the SUR40, before using its touch capabilities to browse the shop's available stock. In the video you'll see apps that let you make a scrapbook out of your digital photos, that you can then buy and have printed, as well as software for examining cars or doing a spot of banking.
The tech hasn't taken off in a big way yet, and I imagine businesses are more than a little nervous about paying so much for an expensive tool that overeager shoppers or children could easily break. And if the software crashes, someone will need to be on hand to turn it off and on again troubleshoot.
Windows 8 (the version of Windows designed for touchscreens) is just around the corner however, so perhaps we're about to see more of this kind of gadgetry sneaking into shops.
Are massive touchscreen gadgets like the SUR40 the future, or just an expensive gimmick? Tell me in the comments or over on our Facebook wall.