Microsoft will deliver an animated consumer touchscreen tablet that is “no thicker than a sheet of glass [at] “really cost effective prices”within the next three years — the next generation of Microsoft’s Surface technology — its principal researcher, Bill Buxton, told The Globe And Mail.

“Right now [Surface] has five cameras in it and a projector and a bunch of other stuff…. What will happen is that Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass…. It’s not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself.

“We’ve been making screens so they can not only emit light but also be like flatbed scanners. So if you put something against them they can see it at the pixel level.

“The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there’s a fourth pixel in every triad. So there’s red, green, and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff.”.