Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'surface'

TEWON35 prototype for Microsoft Surface from 2ndFactory

Adam Kinney — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:24:00 GMT

TEWON35 is a Travel Agency prototype application for Microsoft Surface from 2ndFactory.

The linked video shows interaction thought on how to take advantage of multi-touch along with physical objects. Here's a few highlights from the prototype video:

3:30 - the circular calendar begins the experience
3:50 - the curving timeline is shown
4:30 - attractions are loaded using the wooden figures (I like the organic material touch)
6:00 - building on the familiar scatterview of photos to represent attractions, they use the backside of the photo to display text and videos about the attraction
8:10 - using a smooth casino dealer gesture, the selected attractions are spread out for resorting order
10:00 - the itinerary built is then saved to an encoded card for reuse

This reminds me of the Margie's Travel Hands On Labs, but a way smoother version. A nice additional feature would be if the attractions would take up space relative to the time allotted to check out the attraction. I look forward to seeing this in a production form.

Hat tip to Ken Azuma for passing this along.

Extending the Surface experience in the BMW app

Adam Kinney — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Although quite a few people have linked to this video already, I wanted to point out something interesting. Not that you wouldn’t catch it if you watched the movie. But with the comments of “familiar resizing, option selecting interaction”, you may not take the 2 minutes to check it out.

First off this is important because its a valid real-world usage of the Surface. It’s really fun to watch these pop up more and more.

Secondly, what I liked about the application was the added vertical surface (seen at 0:58). Not only does this create an editor and viewer screen available at the same time, it also works in the favor of the user. You’re used to manipulating things with your hands on a vertical surface. But the viewer showing the accompanying video is familiar as watching TV.

Nice inspiration for creating new applications, congrats to BMW and Vectorform.

Vectorform wins PhizzPop New York with Study Right

Adam Kinney — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:18:00 GMT

On the heels of my fascination with SurfaceDJ, Vectorform impresses again by winning the PhizzPop with Study Right, an innovative education application concept.

The application visualizes what the classroom of the near future may look like when students have Multi-touch laptops and the teacher has a Surface at the front of the room. The software provides tools for the teacher, students and parents.

Teachers can check attendance, student profiles and create lesson plans. Students use their own custom portal to to read and watch videos at their own pace while preparing for the next interactive test. Parent can login from home and see how well their children are progressing.

Its a great concept and I don’t want to ruin it, especially the ending. You should check out the Study Right video on the PhizzPop site. You can also find more information there like when the Chicago event is happening and how you can accept the challenge online.

Continuum on Channel9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:37:00 GMT

The Continuum on Channel 9 is now open for business. Its a central hub for the different online projects coming from myself and my team, including The Continuum Show, Project Rosetta and Continuum News.

What is the Client Continuum?
The Client Continuum is way to view all of the Microsoft UI technologies, currently focusing on WPF, Silverlight, Windows 7, IE8, ASP.NET and Surface. If you look at these different technologies along a line, the range covers very rich client applications to far-reaching web applications, as well as spanning across many different devices. Once you look at that and and realize you use the same skills, languages and tools to create these applications, then you start to smile.

What is The Continuum Show?
The Continuum Show is, not surprisingly, a show focused on the Client Continuum. The object is to create concise videos that show great applications, tools or demos that people are creating with Continuum technologies. The unwritten rule is if the video goes over 5 minutes, than we make an Essentials version that remixes the content down to 5 minutes or less. We're going for "short and interesting" and a little bit of "inspiring".

What are the Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials?
The Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials are focused on helping designers and developers build applications by taking advantage of skills they already know. The initial launch includes the set of lessons From Flash to Silverlight.

If you have ideas for more lessons and tutorials that will help you learn how to do WPF or Silverlight, head over to the feedback forum and make your suggestion.

What about Continuum News?
Fresh information about what's happening in the world of the Client Continuum. Currently this is generated by targeted posts from my blog and the site also includes a buffet of Recommended Reading. Target posting goal is around 0.7 - 2 posts a day. Quality high, quantity negotiable.

What's your conclusion?
If you are designing or developing applications for WPF, Silverlight or another Continuum technology than this mass of content will ideally be one or more of the following: relevant, interesting, inspiring, helpful and make you feel good to know there are others like you.

If its not, let me know. Send me an email or add a comment below.

Multi-touch enlightenment with IdentityMine and Vectorform

Adam Kinney — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Something about companies with compound names...

Being a UI guy, one of the biggest impressions PDC2008 left on me was Multi-touch. This is the first time I've seen it done in so many forms. There were Surface tables everywhere, in the Lounges, Hand-on Labs, Exhibitor booths, in the hallways and even in rare cases under the escalators.

Along with the abundance of Surface tables came the abundance of applications written specifically for Surface. Multi-touch at this scale presents a new design challenge and opportunity, these aren't your basic data entry apps.

IdentityMine's multitude of Multi-touch apps (3:26)

Surface beats with Vectorform (5:26)

IdentityMine had all of the Multi-touch bases covered. On a whirlwind tour of their booth, provided by Kurt Brockett and Meg McAllister, we get to see their Photo Sharing app running on Surface, their Photo Slideshow app using NextWindow touch screens and their AirHockey game running on an HP Touchsmart running Windows 7.

As an added bonus, Gilbert Corrales and Laurent Bugnion make a quick cameo in this Hollywood worthy action film.

You can see more IdentityMine's Surface work on their Surface technology page.

In this video, Vectorform performs using their SurfaceDJ application. Not only is it Multi-touch, WPF-based, Surface-enabled and spouting out fun electronic beats; it is also a great example of a new collaborative type of application. This app makes me want my own Surface table.

Check out Vectorform's Surface blog to see some of their other Surface applications. Yes, they are the ones behind NBC's Electoral application.

With the video interviews and the working and the talking and the more talking, I missed every session but one. Here a few of the relevant Multi-touch sessions, pulled from Mike Swanson's PDC2008 Sessions page, I plan on catching up on.

PC17 | Developing for Microsoft Surface (Brad Carpenter, Robert Levy)
PowerPoint
PC03 | Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications (Anson Tsao, Reed Townsend)
PowerPoint
KYN04 | Day 3 Morning Keynote (Rick Rashid)

Did you get access to the Surface SDK? Are you building something with it? If you are, I'd love to hear about it.

Day 0 at PDC2008 - on inspiration and creativity

Adam Kinney — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 06:20:00 GMT

Here I am in my Moroccan hotel room at the Hotel Figueroa ruminating over the first day at the Conference Center for PDC2008 thinking, who works on a Saturday? Many people do, of course, and some people work really hard like those setting up the Conference Center for the PDC so that the attendees can enjoy the wonderland that it is and will be.

Other people are working hard on a Saturday, like Rick Barraza who shot a video of his latest work, Project Touchstone.

Touchstone is a lobby Surface application written in WPF that takes advantage of Effects and I believe the WPF Effects Library. Its always fun to see when people try new things with new capabilities.

Now I am going to be coy and say "I believe there might be a Surface at PDC". Maybe. Possibly.

On the note of trying new things and being inspired by design. I've recently found two other things I'd like to share. The first is an intriguing slide deck, which Don Campbell thankfully bookmarked, by Chris Wilson that discusses change in design.

Rapid Change in Design: The Changing Landscape & New Rules for Design Project

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

I really like his thinking and especially the packaging - "3 Rules of Rapid Design".

I don't want to give any more away, but its worth the 2,3, even 10 minutes you may find yourself thinking about the slides.

One of the things that really gets me about the slides is that I feel Chris Wilson, the author, may be watching TED talks like myself. If he hasn't that might even be better. It could be a clue that we're heading towards the singularity.

The second item comes from TED Talks, which have become my most recent passion.

I might be late to the game, but that doesn't matter. The reruns are great. Watching TED Talks are entertaining and they fill my head with ideas, give me a different perspective on some of my older thoughts and make me feel like we are not just a collection of gangs, tribes and countries, rather that we are also one human race. Just a peaceful, "ah yes, this is what life could/should be about".

Anyway back to design and being inspired by new things and big conferences in Los Angeles that start with a "P" and end with a "C... ya there", in one the recently posted TED talks Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses creativity, fulfillment and flow. I would recommend the talk to anyone who thinks about what they are doing with their time. I'm not quite sure the following the slide will have the same effect without listening to the talk but I wanted to end this post here because I'm still meditating on it. I think its a great way to think about the work you do. Simply put, aim to spend as much time in the flow as possible.

The PDC flow begins tomorrow with Registration, PDC Marketplace, Pre-Conference Sessions and the WomenBuild Workshop.

"C...ya there!"

The Continuum Show - Essential Editions

Adam Kinney — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:55:00 GMT

Episode 1 of the new show is an 18 minute interview with Phil Haack discussing ASP.NET MVC. This can be a lot of fun to watch, especially if you are a fan of ASP.NET MVC or Phil Haack.

But what if you don't already know about the topics at hand? Would you continue to watch the video for 3 minutes and 38 second when the question is finally asked "What is MVC"?

Probably Not.

This is where the concept of the "Essential Edition" comes in. In order to make the video easier to watch by more people, I'll be extracting out the "Essential" bits into a much shorter video.

After extracting out the tastiest most informative morsels from this video, the end result is a crisp 2 minutes and 41 second interview. You can now find out what MVC is, what's new in Preview 4 and how to find out more information in the time it takes to eat lunch at your desk.

I'll be posting The Continuum Show - Essential Editions on a new YouTube channel and on the TCS Facebook page. For a sample, check out MVC Preview 4 - Essential Edition.

Enter The Continuum Show

Adam Kinney — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:06:00 GMT

The Continuum Show has begun!

In this new show on Channel 9, we'll be exploring the world of the Microsoft Client Continuum. The Continuum refers to the array of UI technologies available form Microsoft including WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, IE8,Windows 7, Surface and more.

We'll be showing new features, patterns and practices from experts and samples of awesome applications. There's a lot of stories that don't always make it out to everyone and I'm excited to be presenting those stories with the new show.

Episode 0 - Hello World and Episode 1 - MVC Preview with Phil Haack have already been published and I have a few more in stock waiting to be published. Some of the episodes already filmed include the NBC Olympics site, Kaxaml and a Facebook application built with ASP.NET and Silverlight.

If you have any suggestions for topics or applications you would like to see covered leave a comment.

To stay tuned to the Continuum Show you can follow along on Twitter, join the room on FriendFeed or become a fan on Facebook.

Now back to the editing room...

Extreme Panoramic Project on Surface and Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:18:00 GMT

Thanks to Scoble for posting the great xRez Studio - extreme pano project video today. The project itself is interesting and the deliver is the frosting on the cake.

70 photographers hiking through Yosemite Park, toting robotic cameras, and positioned by GPS coordinates. They then synchronize their shot taking via radio and in 40 minutes they have 10,000 photos of the park. More details can be found on the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project site.

How could you possibly display all of the photos in a usable and effective way?

*cue SeaDragon music*

Scoble interviews two of the members of the xRez team Eric Hansen and Greg Downing, while they explain the project and demo the application. Photos are overlayed on top of the shooting location map which is displayed in panoramic, multi-touch zooming goodness.

The video gives you an idea of the interaction of the application and the depth of detail available in each of the panoramas. Since it did come from Scoble's phone though, the quality isn't real high. For an idea of what the photos actually look like you can check out their xRez Yosemite Shoot photo pool on flickr.

Towards the end of the film Greg mentions that there will be an online version available soon via Silverlight. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that.