“Real artists ship” is one pearl of wisdom left by Steve Jobs that Apple seems to have taken to heart lately, and it’s one that everyone else really needs to apply. OS X on the fast track, Windows in the slow lane The big tech news of the week is announcement of OS X Mountain [...]
The good folks over at Tested are gushing about a new Microsoft Surface-esque devices called the ePawn Arena. It’s an exciting gadget that is probably going to be the next big thing in gaming. The best part? It costs just hundreds of dollars instead of thousands. The Arena is essentially a large TV screen with [...]
Don’t go looking for a Microsoft Surface 2.0 Table under your tree this holiday season, unless you’re a business that might want to install them in your casino, hospital or store. Microsoft has put the 2nd generation up for pre-order according to a report by Mashable. Surface 2.0 is different than the original. For starters [...]
Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet reports that the Microsoft Research team behind Manual Deskterity is presenting the white paper on their work on Simultaneous Pen + Touch at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. As you may recall but likely have forgotten, the team released a video preview of their work back in [...]
The talk lately is all about Tablets and Slates that’s for sure. But if Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Bill Buxton is correct, we might be seeing more multi-touch in the home about three years from now. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Buxton says that he expects to see Microsoft Surface in homes in [...]
The widely-popular board game Settlers of Catan has gone high-tech with an officially licensed version of the game set to debut at Gen Con Indy 2010 on Microsoft Surface. Combining real dice, in-person players and virtual everything else, this is one of the most robust uses of the technology yet.
Pocket-lint has the exclusive scoop that Sony will be entering the surface computing arena this June with atracTable, an optical recognition-based system first seen at Vision 2009, developed in conjunction with Swiss company Atractsys.
Brown University is working on a project that is a perfect fit for a Microsoft Surface: digitizing the Garibaldi moving panorama. A moving panorama is basically a massive canvas painting that is scrolled in front of an audience to tell a story. The Garibaldi is more than a football field in length. Far too big [...]
If you’ve been itching to develop apps for Microsoft Surface but haven’t had the thousands in loose change necessary to buy a Surface, you’ll be happy to learn there’s a new toolkit that lets you build apps from a Windows Touch PC instead.
I got to stop by the Microsoft Surface team’s office yesterday in Redmond. They gave us a very thorough explanation of how the Surface works and then we got to play with some applications, games and testing tools. I’ve seen Microsoft Surface demos several times at tech trade shows, but I haven’t had such an [...]
A group in the Netherlands called Intactlab has put together a snazzy-looking multi-touch table called Touchy Remix that takes surface computing in a couple of different directions. As you can see, unlike other systems, Touchy Remix is designed so you can pull up a chair and sit at it as if it were a regular [...]
The Microsoft Surface Blog has a video demo of a novel interactive system that involves a little round monster eating bubbles off a Microsoft Surface… and also puking them back up when it’s full. I admit it’s not the most practical use of surface computing, but it is a great demonstration of tangible interactivity. Instead [...]
In the south hall of the CES, Kodak hosted a massive booth to showcase their cameras and accessories. Wouldn’t normally be a big draw for me, but then I saw the ginormous surface computing system set up like a waterfall and river through the middle of their showcase. I want to go to there. And [...]
Microsoft Surface blog has posted that second part of their interview with the SurfaceScapes team, along with a new video demo of the project in action. The video is a bit, shall we say, dry, but anyone interested in the thought process behind the system should find it educational. I found this line from the [...]
Remember SurfaceScapes, the group from Carnegie Mellon turning Microsoft Surface into the ultimate tabletop gaming system? I sent them some blog love in October? Ring a bell? If not, the gist is these guys are creating an interactive Dungeons & Dragons gaming experience on Microsoft Surface, combining the tactile experience of rolling dice and moving [...]
Big news bubbling out of PDC (Professional Developers Conference) surrounding Microsoft Surface. First, the Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition is being offered freely to everyone via the Surface.com website, though the hardware needed to see if your stuff works will still set you back a few stones (or you could save a few bucks and [...]
A German company called Evoluce is going big with multi-touch – really big – by offering 47″ HD LCDs, called The Evoluce ONE, capable of recognizing an unlimited number of points of contact via touch or pen. Their promotional video demonstrates both multiple cursor and natural gesture control by fingers. The ONE supports multi-touch in [...]
Nerds rejoice!* A team at Carnegie Mellon University is taking gaming on Microsoft Surface to its logical end: as a dynamic, interactive board for tabletop gaming, starting with Dungeons & Dragons. From their website: The objective of the SurfaceScapes project is to create a proof-of-concept for playing tabletop role-playing games on the Microsoft Surface Table. [...]
Microsoft’s Surface is still an intriguing device. If it ever really gets put into wide circulation I think it can become a very interesting way for folks to interact. This video from the current Gnomedex conference demos some ways that conference attendees can check out their contacts who may be attending among other cool uses.
The Gizmodo post where I saw this proclaims that this is what touch screens were invented for. I think they may be right. Very impressive.
Ars Technica spoke to folks from design firm Teehan+Lax and Microsoft Surface Director of User Experience, August de los Reyes, to discuss the interface challenges facing Surface. Couple of interesting points. First is the single-user orientation. In theory, Surface should accommodate multiple users. In practice, those multiple users tend to gather at one side of [...]
Looks like Asus wants in on some Surface-like action. Asus showed off its Seamless Experience concept at Computex, and if you think you’ve seen a lot of this before. You have. Competition is a good thing. via Engadget
In this video InkShow, I take a quick look at the multi-touch applications that will be a part of the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7: Surface Collage, Rebound, Blackboard, Garden Pond, Surface Globe, and the Surface Lagoon screen saver. Microsoft Surface technology can be felt all over this pack, from the screensaver to [...]
OK, first you need to pony up the dough for a Surface Computer. No easy task there, but let’s assume you’ve done that part. You might want to check out what the folks at Silicon Illuminated Active Peripherals (SLAP) are working on. Their SLAP widgets can be placed on your Surface Computer and used as [...]
The healthcare industry is getting a lot of focus these days and Microsoft Surface is right in the mix of it. For our readers interested in healthcare and multi-touch, you might want to checkout Surface at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society HiMSS09 conference where a multitude of applications geared around enhancing the [...]
I stopped by the Microsoft booth at Web 2.0 in San Francisco yesterday. Microsoft had several developers showing off their applications and I recorded a couple of demos. In this GBM InkShow Kevin, from Clarity Consulting showed me some apps he developed, including a T-Shirt design application and a wedding-registry application.
Microsoft Surface is starting to stretch out its impact a bit by expanding into EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) markets. They’ve recently announced that Microsoft Surface is now available in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Spain, Sweden, UAE and the UK. Microsoft has (or is about to) publish some new [...]
The Surface team has been on a blogging roll lately and have published four really good articles and some videos you should take a look at. Here is a quick excerpt from one of them covering natural user interface – head over to their site to read the rest. Have I said lately that I [...]
I’m a huge fan of natural user interface technologies (NUI) such as pen, ink, touch, multi-touch, speech, etc. I especially love exploring the technical and usability issues that NUI present. As such, I’ve really been enjoying reading Point & Do – a website devoted to natural user interface technologies. Jonathan, the author of the site, [...]
Ok – this is an absolutely cool app from Stimulant – place your iPhone on a Microsoft Surface, and then you’ll see an x-ray type of picture on the phone. Zoom the picture on the Surface, and the picture zooms on the iPhone. Connect multiple iPhones together and pan across multiple pictures on a Surface. [...]
This Sunday is all about football, food, and commercials. Fortunately, I’ll be kicking back in my recliner taking it all in. For those blessed to have tickets, though, they’ll also have to contend with the normal security issues that come along with such a high profile event. It turns out that Microsoft’s Surface is playing [...]
Dr. Neil Roodyn, a long time friend of this site and many in the Tablet PC space, met up with the Surface team to go over some new education centered applications built for Microsoft Surface. Dr. Roodyn’s company is called nsquared. Those who follow touch, multi-touch, and education will love what nsquared is working on. [...]
We’ve done our fair share of unboxings here on GBM, but I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything like this before: an unboxing of a Microsoft Surface. Checkout this Flickr photoshoot showing the Surface arriving in a huge crate to when the new owner finally gets to move some water around. Fun stuff.
Not that I think a lot of folks have a ton of cash floating around to go buy a Bimmer, but using a Microsoft Surface computer to help pick out that next car is a natural fit for multi-touch and natural user input technology. The application was written for BMW by VectorForm. Check out BMW’s [...]
According to this posting at the Surface team blog, developers looking to get on the PDC special pricing on Surface units have a bit more time. The $13,500 discounted price, which includes 5 licenses of the SDK, has been extended to the end of November. Learn more about Surface.com
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