You've Got The Touch Monday, August 31, 2009 By Patrick Gorman It’s already being leveraged in trade show booths, lobbies, and entertainment venues, and it’s about to change the way designers present visitors with information in environments across the board. Microsoft Surface—the multi-touch, multi-user computing interface is set to explode, and the world of interactive computing experiences won’t be looking back. Surface changes the way people interact with digital information, and the way they interact with one another. It has created a new category that Microsoft dubs surface computing, or the ability to experience digital information using your hands through direct interaction. Traditional touchscreens are effective, but Surface is engaging and immersive in ways that a single-touch interface can never be—the ability to interact with multiple locations on a screen at the same time is changing the way your customers interact with technology and information. “With Surface, you can touch in dozens and dozens of locations; we like to call it massive multi-touch. A surface computer allows you to interact with digital information with other people. It’s no longer a solitary, isolated experience—you can now interact with more than one person at the same time,” says Mark Bolger, a senior director on the Microsoft Surface team. How It Works. The Surface unit is built around a large, 30-inch horizontal display screen. Inside the unit (which was designed to handle the rough and tumble world of public spaces), a series of infrared cameras scan the surface screen for touch, gestures, or physical objects. That input is then sent to a Microsoft Vista PC unit, then back onto the screen via a projector. “That interaction is instantaneous—when you touch the Surface, the cameras sense it, send it through the PC and back up through the projector. It feels like a natural experience,” Bolger says. And the fact that the cameras can sense and scan objects other than a finger opens the door to applications never imagined with more traditional touchscreen technology—and it’s already out there. Apps. Jack Morton’s exhibit for NBC Universal at CES this year featured Surface tables throughout the footprint, with attendees receiving tagged matchbook giveaways that they placed on the Surface table to see if they won a prize and dig into info on the brand, its stable of networks and programming, then play around with trivia challenges and games. In AT&T stores, customers can set a wireless phone that they’re interested in down on Surface, and an optical tag will recognize that phone and bring up content specific to that model. “You can imagine how this completely changes the retail experience for both customer and salesperson,” Bolger says. Content Development. The best part? This is the dawn of a new era. Microsoft has partnered with over 120 content developers globally who are focused on pushing this technology to new horizons. One major partner is San Francisco-based Stimulant, an interactive design agency focused on developing user experiences centered around emerging technologies and new interaction paradigms. Stimulant design director Nathan Moody says the multi-touch interface is great, but there are other aspects of the technology which excite his team. “Even more interesting is the advent of multi-user experiences, where multiple people are using the same computing device. That’s where we think multi-touch really comes into its own—having a social interaction with people that is facilitated by the multi-touch, multi-user device,” Moody says. The exciting thing for content developers lies in the fact that because this technology is so new, there are few established best practices, allowing designers to really push the envelope. The fact that a major company like Microsoft is behind the technology doesn’t hurt, either, with benefits such as actual company support, an upgrade path, an industry standard Windows Vista operating system—things that weren’t available when designers were creating these types of custom applications from scratch. “We want to create end-user experiences that feel completely custom, but it’s all being run from a very robust database on the back end and visual content is just being pumped in programmatically. When we heard about Surface, all of that started to really come together for us. In addition to the fact that several people can stand on this thing without it breaking, it’s designed to have stuff spilled on it—it is hardened in a way that no other device can come close to,” Moody says. Stimulant’s TouchTones app for the Surface was inspired by the work of artist Toshio Iwai, who has created installation art pieces and a game/art piece for the Nintendo DS called Electroplankton. TouchTones is a collaborative music creator that allows up to four users with no musical background to compose music in real time by touching different areas of a grid on the Surface. “We wound up replicating the controls on all four sides of the Surface. Designing a 360-degree user interface is one of the unique things about Surface that you don’t get if you designing something like a multi-touch wall, because there is a very clear top and bottom to that wall. There is no top of bottom, left or right with Surface because it’s all relative based on where you’re sitting,” Moody says. “It’s an incredibly enabling platform to be developing on.” Cost. The pricepoint is steep, currently at $12,500 per unit, but Microsoft envisions the cost dropping in the future. “If you think back to the original days of large screen televisions, you’d see them in entertainment and leisure environments first, and they were quite expensive. Eventually they made their way into homes,” Bolger says. Future. Now that multi-touch, multi-user surface computing applications such as Surface are out there, it’s up to designers of events, experiences, and environments to come up with ways to leverage them and tell a client’s story in a ways that have never been so immersive, interactive, and engaging. “I look toward the future of multi-touch with the anticipation that we will finally have enough tools in our user experience toolbox to make smarter decisions around what interface paradigms we use in what context. Part of the big challenge—especially in event design—is that as soon as people see a mouse and keyboard, it already sets an expectation of an experience that will be somehow related to work; not related to play, nor exploration, nor fun. Once we start finding those contexts in which we can start removing the mouse and keyboard where it makes sense, then we have a quiver of other interaction paradigms that we can use that make a lot more sense,” Moody says. Enjoy the ride.
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