At the start of 2007, Microsoft was debuting a new product category dubbed surface computing with Microsoft Surface, a tabletop with a Windows Vista-running machine under the hood and multi-touch, gesture and object recognition capabilities. Now, the Redmond company is gearing up to introduce the evolution of its tabletop computer with Sphere. Both Surface and Sphere are examples of surface computers developed by Microsoft, but the design approaches are focused in different directions, namely a plane surface and a sphere.

Microsoft Surface only became available to select corporate customers in 2008, but Sphere is very much just a research project and a prototype. As of yet Microsoft has no plans to commercialize the product, but this aspect will surely change as the technology will move forward. But in the end, the fact is that Sphere is much more limited in its attempt to become a commercial product than Surface ever was by its sheer shape.

Microsoft will essentially have to reinvent the wheel or, in this case, the sphere, in order to make the concept of a computer with a spherical display appealing and even more than that, usable. For now, Sphere seems to be tailored perfectly well on a few scenarios, such as mapping with Virtual Earth integration, but not much of anything else, although gaming, media viewing (either pictures or videos) are indeed a possibility. In this regard, Sphere has more potential than Surface to become a nucleus for a group of users, as you can see from the video embedded at the bottom of this article, courtesy of SeattlePI.

The Sphere demonstration is carried out by Sphere Hrvoje Benko of Microsoft Research who explains that the Redmond company worked to ensure that the product would be able to support omni directional views in an effort to tailor environment data on the spherical display. Built in collaboration with Global Imagination, which had already played with similar technology in the past, Sphere's display is some 18 inches in diameter, and features a combination of infrared cameras and a projector to enable user interaction.