The Surface surfaced
Three days ago I was invited to play around with the Microsoft Surface for the whole day. The only prior knowledge I had of the Surface was from various demonstration videos, so I had great expectations when I entered the room where the Surface was kept.
The Surface stood in the middle of the room resembling a coffee table in size and thus telling us something about where it should be placed within the house. After playing a bit with it and trying out some of the demo applications (puzzle, fireflies, XNA scatter, map, and paint) it was clear that the tracking delay varied. I'm not sure why. It might be the implementation of the current application or something happening in the hardware. But it was not acceptable at its worst performances. I find it important to tell the reader at this point that this post might seem a bit negative in its view on the Surface, which is likely due to the fact that I've worked with multitouch for an entire semester, so to me it's not new in that sense - my arms have come down ;) My expectations were therefore on some of the extra features I had seen in videos and on how to utilize multitouch in an ingenious way.
Coming to terms with my expectations... It seemed a lot like Microsoft's Vista - a lot of promising and interesting features, but in the end scrapped away leaving us with only a multitouch table. Features such as scanning of images placed on it and communication with e.g. cell phones, digital camera etc. is hot air. The Surface supports 52 inputs as I recall. It supports tracking markers (stickers) that can be placed on objects like e.g. a cell phone. The Surface will then recognise when that object is placed on the table. The surface of the Surface is smooth allowing your fingers to move freely on it and the picture projected is quite good. However, the Surface is noisy, which will be a problem if it’s placed in the living room. Aside it is equipped with speakers that seem able to produce decent sound. The video below doesn’t quite give it credit for this.
The Surface has better tracking capabilities compared to the table I did when I was at AAU. The increased price however, doesn't add up (think it was $ 7,000-10,000). It's very expensive and I think that multitouch is currently more hyped than we have actual seen usefulness for it. It’s clear that touch is more intuitive to use, but hey – were talking multi-touch here! That is not to say that multitouch doesn't have interesting properties that we don't find within our normal peripherals, but I like to see demonstrations that display multitouch as a more effective interaction method for some applications compared to regular keyboard-mouse use. Most of the people I’ve seen use multitouch, including myself, rely on one-finger interaction. Many of the applications out there doesn’t require more than one-finger use. In rare cases up to four fingers are used (index and thumb on both hands) typically for gestures. So is it the applications fault or are we the limiter? I blame some of the applications, but in the end I think that we are the limiter, even with better applications, due to occlusion. One of the worst downsides of multitouch is that you occlude your own view when using it. Seen from a more game oriented perspective, since that what I’m studying, this only gets worse when multiple people are using the table at the same time (as can be seen in the video below). This greatly restricts what type of applications are possible doing on a multitouch table, since the users creates noise on their own in the interaction process.
Being a coffee table in size I find it uncomfortable and exhausting using the Surface for a prolonged time. Firstly, there is no room for your feet underneath it forcing you to sit at a distance or sideways. Secondly, you are bent over the Surface when using it consequently sitting in an awkward "working" position. We were told, I think it was in the license, that the table wasn't to be raised, which means it’s a solid block from top to bottom and thus doesn't seem to aid in solving this problem.
We were given access to the Surface SDK and used most of the day developing for the Surface. Unfortunately Windows XP is not a darling among Microsoft anymore, which meant that I couldn't install the SDK :/ I worked at another machine but didn't have enough time to finish my game :( I used some time after I got home, since I'm a bit stubborn and don't want to install Vista or Windows 7 just to be able to install the SDK. It might be possible to get it to work, since I got the contents for the .msi file extracted after updating the Windows Installer Service to 4.5 (prior 3.1). Using a MSI viewer a short glance the registry keys told me that it'll require a serious amount of manual labour if it's not impossible at all.
I think that rolling this out as a coffee table is entirely wrong. Ideally it should be made into what its name implies - a surface. I know this might be impossible currently based on the technology used (projector(s) and cameras), which require space, but if I want it in my home I need to replace my current coffee table with this noisy one which comes in one size. If this is still the aim, then Microsoft should focus on making it 100% silent and develop applications that interplay with the rest of the electronics found in the living room. I want to e.g. use it as one big remote, use it to easily see today’s TV program and make easy selections of what I want to record using my HD recorder. Interaction with your TV using a remote is lame ;) In the games section focus should be on games similar to trivial pursuit that doesn’t require players to constantly interact with the Surface – I want to be able lean back on the couch and observe (and relax my back :)).
The video shows a combined effort in surviving for as long as possible in the game created by Jacob Korsgaard for the Surface.