Microsoft Surface

A few posts back I talked about multi-touch interaction on displays that made gestures and interaction with software a lot more fun and leanient. Well, it looks like the works of Andy Wilson at Microsoft Research has finally pulled through to a product come this Winter 2007.

 http://www.microsoft.com/surface

Surface

One of the more interesting concepts that has come out of the research is not just the idea of gestures but the concept of placing objects on a screen and having the object be apart of the digital world. Like in the above example, the lady has placed her Zune on the table along side the camera. When the camera was placed on the table, all the images instantly spread out for dragging and moving around. She can then drag a picture that was on the camera over to her zune. Or in a different example where a cell phone is placed on the table and the man sets up his trip and appointments by moving things to the phone. The seemless feel between our physical world and the digital is becoming quite apparent. I need to work on a few WPF apps to take advantage of this.