I never did have much patience… so why wait for Microsoft Surface?
In case you haven't heard about Microsoft Surface, head over here for a quick look at what I think will be a huge influencer on personal computing in the future house hold as well as business in general.
Surface isn't just about a cool way of letting people use a computer, its much more than that. It's about collaboration amongst multiple users, digital tangibility and giving new and exciting takes on old ideas.
That's right... old ideas.
Despite what Microsoft may tell you in the marketing brochure, this type of computing has been around for a very long time and indeed there are several other companies that have been producing multi-touch (MT) systems for quite some time; but I must give Microsoft their credit, none of the other companies appear to have ever consulted a PR agency or really latched onto the potential of collaborative user experience and marketed it in quite the same way... Jeff Han is getting there though and the following demonstrates how his product is even more advanced than Surface:
You will hear me rattle on about user experience quite a bit, and what is great about the surface computing idea is that while you can get away with applications on the desktop and web that have rubbish user experience (well people have for years), I think it would be hard to try the same thing on a surface because people just wont be able to use your application.
From what I know of the Surface SDK, it aims to take away a lot of the "head tax" involved with getting elements to appear on the screen and allowing the user to twist and turn them in a standardised – gesticulated way. An extended WPF control set allows you to simply specify an items control panel which automatically gives the elements physics based movement on the surface.
This is all great and very exciting, but it would appear that Microsoft are travelling down a very specific and strategic path, pushing this technology out into the market place, meaning that big corporate retail and entertainment are the first clients and then big design agencies are next, while hanging the people that are very much into WPF and XNA, out to dry… well at least for a few years to come.
So I start doing some research in this past few weeks, about how I might go about building such a device and replicating some, if not all of the features of the surface, so as I might at the very least get a real head-start on the technology. You would be correct in thinking that I wouldn't have a Surface SDK, but the main point is that I would be thinking more and more about that collaborative scenario, understanding usability from the surface representation and gaining valuable insight into what the end users expectation is, as well as measuring their points of user experience tolerance.
After completing the research, I can tell you that it is very possible to build this machine and not only that but to also run WPF and XNA on it.
I am going to document my progress in here as much as possible and at the end of it all, if I am successful and people are interested, then I might just make a simple inexpensive kit (as much as possible) that will allow other to experiment with the same system and the same multi-touch technology.
Let me know if you are interested in that and I will make sure I compile a list for it.