Remember Microsoft's gesture-based table computer called Surface? We got a hands-on of it back at All Things D, but Ars Technica got an in depth look, getting videos of some of the eight apps—some of which ship with it in late 2007.
Some of those we saw before in the Surface announcement, some of them—like the water app—are new, and quite neat. Besides the water app, which you can swish your hand around on to make waves, there's the video puzzle, a finger paint program, a music app, photo app, casino app, a T-Mobile demo app that lets you see specs of any phone, and the dining app.
The machine itself is actually quite similar to Windows Media Center and runs on top of standard Windows Vista, which itself runs on top of an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB RAM, and a "moderately-powerful graphics card."
The final price is still undecided, but it looks like somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 will get you one of these to use in your business. What's most interesting is that Microsoft is using the XNA development environment so that people can create custom applications for the Surface. XNA is supported, but most of the Surface software is written for WPF. [Ars Technica]