Microsoft's multi-touch Sphere plays crazy Pong

Microsoft's touch-sensitive sphere is, at present, mostly just a stream of nonsensical marketing ("we wanted to explore collaborative actions" ... "and you have this notion of pseudoprivacy"), but a couple of minutes in they finally get to putting cool stuff on it, like dynamic world maps and and an omnidirectional view of downtown Seattle. And Pong!

John Timmer at Ars Technica reports that there are no plans to make the $5,000-$10,000 Sphere commercially available. If perhaps the perfect reminder of why companies like Apple don't research things they can't sell, it's still awe-inspiring all the same. A global Missile Command game, like forgotten Psygnosis flop Global Domination, would be perfect.

Previously: One day your computer will be a big ass table.

MS Surface goes spherical, but probably won't go global [Ars]

[#1 posted by Trent Hawkins , July 30, 2008 6:17 AM]

they still got that gimble lock problem when things are on the top of the sphere.

Still, it looks cool. Must be a hell of a thing to program a 3d game for.

[#2 posted by Anonymous , July 30, 2008 11:03 AM]

Half of the blog reports I've read mention something along the lines of, "OMG, I wanna see Google Earth on a spherical display!!!"

I thought the killer feature of Google Earth / Google Maps is the ability to zoom. How do you zoom in on a sphere?

[#3 posted by Rob Beschizza , July 30, 2008 3:47 PM]

EXACTLY. I just want to nuke stuff.

[#4 posted by StephenF , July 30, 2008 8:38 PM]

Wasn't this Douglas Coupland's self-referential invention in JPod?