Will your next PC come from Ikea?

In the next few years, you may go to a furniture shop to get your computer rather than a traditional reseller if August de los Reyes has his way.

As principal design director for Microsoft's multi-touch platform Surface, de los Reyes is building interfaces so simple that they hide the underlying technology and build intelligence into everyday objects.

The much-lauded Microsoft Surface is a tabletop display that reads a variety of input using five video cameras, one of which reads infrared heat signatures. During a demonstration at Microsoft's executive briefing centre in Sydney, Microsoft evangelist Michael Kordahi demonstrated applications that ranged from digital artwork creation to planning a trip using prototype software developed for Lonely Planet's Sydney airport shop.

De los Reyes, who is a member of the Advanced Studies Program at his alma mater Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, says the use of a device such as Surface that reads input from up to 50 sources and is used by many people at the same time in collaborative pursuits is an examples of the "poetic term" in technology. He says such technology is natural to use and taps an "ambiguity" in everyday objects.

"In Microsoft Surface you take an ordinary table and it is imbued with an experience beyond a tabletop; in that way it becomes a poetic version of its everyday self," de los Reyes says.

"In traditional user-interface models, the way an experience is set up is the user has a cognitive model of what they want to do with software and a physical model through the mouse and keyboard.

"With multi-touch, those converge where physical action and the cognitive model are the same so people come to the conclusion that it's a natural experience because they don't have to make a leap from one thing to the other."

Furniture is a natural way to represent information. De los Reyes says the amount of visible technology in the home or office is probably as great as it will be; from now, it will be embedded in everyday objects providing "ambient" information constantly.

The table is just the first, natural step because it was always used for social organisation such as when families gathered to exchange the day's stories: "The table has always denoted a place of transaction and a horizontal surface allows you to put objects on it".

This last point was important for the Lonely Planet prototype in which travellers plan a trip scenario, sharing digital assets such as images, text and video with each other as they build their itinerary. This information is sent from the Surface device to a physical "passport" - a piece of cardboard - that stores the data simply by placing it on the table.

Social media impact on user interaction

De los Reyes says the "social stance" in software development is accelerating the trend to such "naive user interfaces".

"These experiences create a very positive sensation on a physical and cognitive level," de los Reyes says.

"This is an opportunity for hardware and solid interactions to catch up with that [social-software movement].

"We have seen people sharing media, sitting side by side at a laptop or crowded around a telephone, watching a video.

"Surface allows for a truly multimedia experience. Multi-touch allows people to collaborate in real-time and collaborate or perform parallel activities and that's the unique opportunity."

In some ways this is a return to basics - the telephone and computer were originally pieces of furniture that were "destinations" for users, he says.

"Jump a few decades ahead and the phone is untethered and you have mobile devices.

"The next step is the phenomenon of the phone disappears in a sense because it's an ambient element and becomes architectural again in an implicit way."

While not every home, office or shop will have a Surface panel, Microsoft is already extending the concept through technology under the hood in Windows 7 and Silverlight, its web application framework and answer to Adobe's Flash, which integrates multimedia with interactivity.

In the Lonely Planet example, the travellers en route or on arrival could access their itinerary data stored on Microsoft's Azure cloud service from a web kiosk or, potentially, a mobile phone that understood Silverlight, even if a Surface device was unavailable.

The process was made easier at the outset because the travellers used their native senses.

"From our own research team, users see an advance in leveraging their spatial memory - there's a whole set of naive physics explicit to the software that people use the same cognitive approaches that they would with physical objects in the real world," de los Reyes says.

"In one of our studies we were observing a pair of users planning a surfing trip and there was all sorts of information and the screen and, from an observer's standpoint, it was extremely cluttered, a total mess.

"But when the researchers asked what did they (the trip planners) think of the tabletop their response was it was very well organised."

* August de los Reyes will speak at the XMediaLab in Sydney this Friday. Follow him on Twitter @augustdlr