This week (Dec 9, 2009), the Microsoft Surface was setup at the Interaction Design Lab. First impressions: Multi-touch works very well and is really snappy, as is the overall responsiveness. With 30 inch the screen appears rather small, indeed. The resolution of just 1024 × 768 is ok for this size; not super crisp, but good enough. The device itself has an unusual height, and gives the impression of a clumsy coffee table. Besides finger interaction the table can recognize objects marked with special symbols.
Technical information (plus many glossy pictures) you can find at the official Surface site. If you don’t mind the occasional company speak the Microsoft Surface User Experience Guidelines is an interesting read, with many good recommendations on gestures, interaction design, and information aesthetics. Some of the advices and ideas might also be helpful for groups working with other surface computers and tabletops.
We’ve got a couple of Surface SDKs to develop applications with. Native development is on Windows only, and besides the SDK you’ll need a Microsoft IDE (e.g. the free Visual C# Express Edition). Fortunately, researchers from the University of Konstanz and creators of Squidy released a Surface-to-TUIO bridge, which sends the tracked finger and object data via the TUIO protocol. Thus, one should be able to use Processing, Flash, or any other preferred programming language.
The Surface was funded by the European Regional Development Fund to support research and industry projects within the scope of geovisualizations and visual analytics, as well as for exhibitions and multi-player games. It will be used as prototyping device for innovative visualizations and interactions in multi-user scenarios.
