Rick Barraza
Silverlight UX Development
Thursday March 19, 2009
Microsoft Surface Physics and SXSW
Microsoft made some great announcements at MIX09 and I'm very glad that we can start talking about them publicly. However, it has also been a busy couple of months for Cynergy Labs, and I will be blogging a series of tutorials over the coming weeks that will cover some of our discoveries, UX techniques and results.
While I released a Microsoft Surface video last year that covered some of our initial experience sketches we first developed (i.e., using tag based business cards to interact with the cloud, physical deformations of objects when undergoing touch manipulation, etc.) I was recently invited by Microsoft to demonstrate some of the newer concepts I've been developing the few weeks.
So here is a video of my most recent Surface experiments to kick off my new series of blog posts. The video shows a collection of Surface UX sketches that explore pixel shaders, physics and interactive model recognition. I desined and developed all four of the sketches as well as the sketch framework in less than a week (though some of the guts use some algorithms I've been figuring out in Silverlight the past couple months). As a collection, I'm trying to present them more as a series of talking points to stimulate conversation among many industries, rather than a finished or specialized solution to a limited problem.
My goal is to start adding a significant message to the Surface conversation: the power of WPF that lies underneath and inside the Surface box has a great deal of potential. While Deep Zoom and ScatterView continue to be audience favorites and gave us that first "Oooh" experience with their simplicity and power, I want to make sure people realize that there is still so much more to come in the Surface story and multi-touch applications in general (including Windows 7).
I hope you enjoy this first video and come back over the next months for a various tutorials covering Surface interface design, Silverlight 3 Beta, Pixel Shaders and a whole bunch more.
/rk
