The term "surface computer" was first adopted by Microsoft for its PixelSense (codenamed Milan) interactive platform, which was publicly announced on 30 May 2007.
Featuring a horizontally-mounted 30-inch display in a coffee table-like enclosure, users can interact with the machine's graphical user interface by touching or dragging their fingertips and other physical objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.
The resulting pictures can then be moved across the screen, or their sizes and orientation can be adjusted as well.
PixelSense's internal hardware includes a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, an off the shelf graphics card, a scratch-proof spill-proof surface, a DLP projector, and five infrared cameras to detect touch, unlike the iPhone, which uses a capacitive display.
The first PixelSense units were used as information kiosks in the Harrah's family of casinos.