Microsoft Reinvents the Conference-Room Whiteboard With the Surface Hub

Mike Angiulo demos the Surface Hub at Microsoft. (Photos: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

An XBox guy wants to make your meetings better.

Mike Angiulo, the corporate VP of XBox Hardware, is also in charge of a new Microsoft product, the Surface Hub. This device is a computer built in to a big flat-screen 4K TV, and it’s designed for one thing: conference room meetings.

The Surface Hub, which was unveiled at the Jan. 21, 2015, Windows 10 event — and overshadowed by the Microsoft HoloLens reveal there — will run Windows 10 apps, but it’s really designed for displaying images, letting people collaborate on them, and serving as a videoconferencing station.  It’s a one-box computer, but it serves just that one purpose: It’s a meeting computer.

The hardware and software package is unique and original. Two Surface Hub models are in development right now, an 84-inch diagonal one with a 4K display (which I had some time with) and a 55-inch version with HDTV resolution. Both have capacitive touchscreen displays (like your smartphone). The technology to make a touchscreen display work at this size took some development, Angiulo says. In addition to tweaking the touch system to reject electrical interference (much harder at that size than on a 5-inch smartphone), designers made the glass on the display much thicker than on a normal flat-screen TV. That enables you to press down on it without it buckling or “pooling” (showing blobs when you press). It’s also coated with an antifriction material so your fingers don’t drag or skip when you’re using it.

The result? It’s an extremely intuitive, extremely good, extremely gigantic multitouch display. I took it for a spin and without any training or coaching was using multitouch gestures to navigate and manipulate onscreen objects. But I was using two hands to make wide sweeping gestures, instead of two fingers as I would on a phone. And it’s big enough so two people can easily work on an image side by side at the same time.

Meeting hardware

The Hub also has two pens (one clips on to each side), and they’re very responsive. If you’ve used previous big-screen pen systems, this will be a treat. There’s no input lag, and the line you put down appears right under the pen tip, not at some distance from it. It feels natural.

The Hub’s pen dock, one of two.

The Surface Hub has two wide-angle cameras, one on the left edge of the display and one on the right, mounted at about eye height (in Angiulo’s demo conference room, they were exactly at his eye level). The software is supposed to be able to recognize faces, so if you’re close to the screen (if you’re writing on it), the camera that can see your face best will pick you up, instead of the one looking at the back of your head. That’s XBox technology in action.

There are cameras on both the left and right frame borders.

The microphones in the Surface Hub also borrow from the Xbox: “Beam-forming” mics zero in on the lips of the person talking (identified by the camera software) and block out extraneous chatter and background noise.
Videoconferencing happens over Skype for Business on the Surface Hub. This more-secure version of Skype can connect to people using plain Skype on their personal computers.

Angiulo told me the whole idea of the Surface Hub is that it’s supposed to be intuitive and fast to use. He wants to save people from the time and pain of setting up a conference or video call (this is a pain I experience several times a week at my own job). One time-saving feature: A Hub can be “reserved” through Outlook’s calendar, so when you step into a room with a Surface Hub and it’s on your calendar, it’s a one-tap operation to get the meeting set up and everybody dialed in.

Microsoft Hub in resting mode.

In ad-hoc (nonreserved) mode, it’s also easy to get going. You don’t have to log into the Windows account on the machine. You just walk up and pluck the pen out of its magnetic dock. The machine shifts into OneNote mode and you start sketching. You can also broadcast your phone or PC screen to the Hub. (If you want to display your Apple device’s screen on the Hub, you’ll need to either hard-wire it or plug an Apple TV into the Hub and use that, since Apple doesn’t support the Miracast protocol that the Hub can read.)

When you close a meeting, you can email your notes to yourself, and you’ll get OneNote files. Then the Surface Hub resets itself for the next user, leaving no data behind.

Multiuser, single purpose

Several  people can use the surface at once: The multitouch display responds to multiple inputs, anybody who is near the screen can draw on it, and more than one person can send their personal computer or smartphone display to the Hub to share with the room or the people on the other end of the conference call (it can display screens side-by-side).

A videoconference in action.

I saw a few apps in my demo of the Surface Hub: videoconferencing, taking notes with OneNote, a Microsoft Map display (totally fun), seeing Angiulo’s PC display on the screen, and a demo display showing a technical diagram of an engine that I could manipulate and zoom in on (and do rudimentary edits on).

I have used several large touchscreen devices before, and I’ve never used one that’s as intuitive and slick as the Surface Hub. The hardware — the giant 4K display, and the fantastic touchscreen — is really leagues better than previous products in this space. I expect that the device will likely be popular as a whiteboard for brainstorm, design, and engineering meetings.

Working with a design file

The videoconferencing functionality is also quite strong. It certainly beats those overpriced, dedicated videoconferencing systems that fancy conference rooms get and nobody learns how to use. I wasn’t able to experiment with call setup myself, although if meeting organizers do in fact use Outlook to set up video calls before meetings start, this device could eliminate a lot of that annoying sit-down-and-wait time while the organizer tries to connect remote participants.

Unbudgeted expense

I don’t predict that a ton of businesses will jump into equipping all their conference rooms with Surface Hubs. But this is a good first version of a meeting room product. It’s versatile enough to serve several meeting purposes: It’s a better whiteboard than what you have now (and nearly as big as many); it’s a good display for projecting from personal devices; and it’s a strong videoconferencing system.

I expect it will be quite expensive, but Microsoft hasn’t set prices. The company plans to start selling Surface Hub later this year.