The Microsoft Milan Surface Computing system represents 5 years of development. We have seen similar demonstrations in the past, the SensitiveWall Towers and Ultimate Gaming Touch Screen come to mind. The Microsoft system looks more refined however new product demos always look great…

Videos after the jump.

“At its core, Milan is powered by a fairly standard high-end Vista PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card, 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2GB of memory. To make the touch screen work, Microsoft crams a lot of other stuff into its tabletop unit. Underneath the roughly textured scratch-proof and spill-proof surface covering the top of the unit, five infrared cameras sense fingers or other objects touching the surface, while a DLP projector turned on its side generates the screen image people see.

As for Milan, the software maker hopes to get the technology into lots of other areas, such as the education market, in addition to into consumers’ hands. Although the initial customers are getting the same tabletop design, Microsoft says the product will eventually come in other shapes and sizes, including vertical, or stand-up units.”

Via: Crave and Ubergizmo