Microsoft Surface

I came a cross a link on the NUIgroup community forum, about a product called Microsoft Surface. It seems that Microsoft is, after doing intensive research on Touchlight, also getting into the game that's called multitouch.

Visit the Microsoft Surface website here.

The product has some nice interaction design features, like putting a phone on the surface, recognize the phone and displaying it’s features and the ability to compare the features of the different phones on the surface, see the content (photo's, mp3's) of a device (for example: mp3 player) and share data by just drag and drop.

But when you want to do that, my guess is that those phones need to support that as well. So that’s still some work that needs to be done, but the idea is good. Nokia also had some nice interaction ideas for future phones. I’m sure youtube has some videos about that. I believe nui posted a few related videos on the NUIgroup blog a while ago.

T-mobile is one of MS' partners, so my guess is T-mobile will be selling phones soon supporting collaboration with these devices.

They also implemented that idea I had a while ago of not only using it as a computer, but using it as a coffee effect table at the same time. If you go into a special modus, that it doesn't function as a computer, but as a surface that generates nice effects around the objects that are being placed on top of it. Next thing I had in mind was, making it a rotatable device, so you have a third modus where you can also use it as a television.

When I started getting into multitouch, I was like if you want to make money with it you should have a target group that has money. So the first two I thought of where the government and casino's. Kinda fun to now see MS having Harrah's Entertainment Inc.'s casinos in Las Vegas as a partner.

I hope they did some descent research on the use of gestures. Whiche they probably did, since they worked on this project for 6 years.Not that people adapt non logical gestures and have learned to use them over time, because it’s the microsoft “standard”, meaning that they use for example the gesture of a cross (X) as a delete, close app or stop function or whatsoever and not as a open up menu.By googling, I found out Reuters released an article about Microsoft Surface as well.

View that article here.

Since I have people from New York visiting this blog as well, I wanted to inform them of the fact that, soon there will be a presentation in New York, of the Microsoft Surface that is open to public (details below).
Sheraton New York HOtel & Towers at 811 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019. Saturday, June 9, 2007. Time TBD.

You also might want to look at Larry Larsens blog, which contains a nice video of how the Surface works.