Now, we’re fairly platform agnostic over at Stimulant — we’ve had a chance to work with the most homebrew of systems all the way up to some of the most polished. Surface is just one of many tools in our arsenal, but I feel like it’s a bit misunderstood. Sure you can build your own multitouch system for the price of a Wii remote, a projector and a laptop. But that’s about where the similarities end. Even higher end multitouch systems seem to either ignore or miss some of the finer points of Surface, and that’s what I’d like to discuss.

Surface > Multitouch

Yes, Surface senses a multiple touches. But it’s also inherently multi-user (given its flat orientation) and most interestingly, it features object recognition. The last one there seems to be one of the most overlooked features of Surface. Beyond blob detection, Surface can recognize a finger and determine in which direction that finger is pointing. Most infrared-based multi-touch systems are happy to get a blob at all, and call it a day. Beyond that, the cameras housed inside (with help from some smart software) can can recognize unique shapes, as well as read data from “domino” tags — small 3/4″ stickers with a series of dots on them that encode a short identifier. These tags could theoretically be printed or engraved on physical items as well, enabling an easy way to interface with said objects. This thinking “beyond the blob” really sets Surface apart in its capabilities — at least with regard to other offerings out there today. It adds a level of richness to the user experience (when leveraged properly, of course) that I’ve yet to see equaled elsewhere.

Easy to build

There are a smattering of open source frameworks showing up that enable multitouch hacking, from players such as NUIGroup and Ideo, and I applaud them all. But none of them feature a rich and full SDK that comes with well-thought out controls — it not only makes rapid prototyping easy, it enforces evolving best practices for user interaction. Plus, you’ve got the enitre .NET 3.5 platform at your fingertips. Admittedly, there’s a very sharp learning curve for folks who haven’t dabbled in Windows Presentation Foundation. But we’ve seen first-hand how much effort is going in to testing, developing and documenting this SDK. Think of what the iPhone SDK did to enable and “standardize” user experiences for 3rd party application development on the iPhone. It’s like that, only for a big-ass table.

Also worth mentioning that Surface can also be programmed against using XNA, which, though lacking any sort of UI controls or safety nets, opens Surface hacking up to a world of game developers already familiar with the framework.

I’m hoping that we will see these open source SDKs evolve into something as polished as the iPhone or Surface SDK, but until then, it seems like there’s something to be said for the cathedral over the bazaar.

Built to Last

The world of “installation computing” is a mixed bag. On one hand, you’ve got complete control over the hardware, so there’s no worrying about tweaking your app for the odd edge case. On the other hand, when something breaks, you can guess who’s getting a phone call. So given an opportunity to design and install and application that needs to persist in a public space, if you’re smart, you’re going to go with the burliest, most bulletproof, battle-tested option. The homebrew and grassroots options out there are amazingly functional, but whose pager goes off when a mac mini melts down or someone kicks the box and the webcamera gets out of alignment? If you’re playing with Surface, Microsoft is offering a solid level of on-site support for its units. That’s enough to let me sleep soundly at night.

Not to mention that Surface units are built to support the weight of a full human, withstand spilled drinks and survive rough play. The whole thing is built like a tank, and it’s been through multiple design revs so while you may laugh at that form factor, you’ll thank Microsoft for having put these things through years of the lather/rinse/repeat cycle to get it where it is today. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I’d have a hard time deploying a Cubit in a public space in a remote city where someone wasn’t there to tend to it night and day. These DIY pieces are fantastic for development and exploration, but I’m not so sure about permanent installation. It’s a frustrating conundrum — you can build an inexpensive system to play with, but where do you deploy your work? Ah, life on the bleeding edge.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a complete supporter of every single effort out there exploring these new interaction paradigms; heck, we’re building our company around just these kinds of hardware solutions. The more people that start working in the arena, the faster the technology makes its way into the mainstream, and the more familiar these solutions get, the lower the barrier for designing solutions that can be enjoyed and used successfully by a larger audience. I merely wanted to highlight some of the characteristics of Surface that seem to go unmentioned in most discussions, all of which are why we’re particularly excited about this platform. I expect that we’ll be hacking together several franken-systems over time because we like to play, too. But when showtime hits, it’s nice to know there’s a piece of hardware out there that has our back.

Application cannot run without client.properties file

I contacted Yugma support, and was informed that this bug was only happening to less than 1% of their Vista users, and that they were unable to reproduce — hence, there would be no fix. Undeterred, I’ve been Googling for a fix for a while now, and today happened to stumble upon this post by Alessandro Vernet with regard to getting the app up and running on the Mac. Heartened that it might simply be a missing file problem, I quickly scanned my Yugma dir (located in my userdir on C:\), but found the client.properties file right where one would expect it to be.

Next step was to run Process Monitor, one of my favorite low-level Windows debugging tools, to see what file the app was actually requesting. Turns out that many of the requests for that file were successful, but 1 request was being made on the E:\ drive for:

E:\Users\darren\AppData\LocalLow\ Yugma\properties\client.properties

Eh? Well it turns out that I had moved my Vista user dirs to another drive, and while Yugma installs to C:\Users\darren\Yugma by default, there is code in the app that seems to trust Vista with regard to where the userdir is. Well, my janky solution was to copy the entire Yugma dir to the E:\ drive location, and it worked like a charm.

I’m not sure this a long-term solution, but hopefully it will help Yugma correct the problem for other users.

Now, if you’re reading this message, then we most likely *just* finished presenting MIXr — our realtime, mobile-based social networking application — at Scott Guthrie’s MIX08 keynote. MIXr’s sole purpose in life is to help users to figure out where the party is at *right this instant.*

It’s a fully data-driven, touchscreen-based application, running on Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6. It aggregates user ratings, such as a venue’s mood, line length, and music, and uses interactive data visualization to make it easy to figure out what’s hot and what’s not. Notable is that it’s the first gesture-based Silverlight UI on a mobile device.

We’re clearly excited about not only Silverlight 2.0 (WPF goodness is finally here!), but that Microsoft’s deal with Nokia really cements Silverlight’s future as a serious contender. Big props to everyone on the Silverlight team.

If you’re at MIX08, feel free to give us a shout at mix08@stimulant.io. And expect more frequent posts in this (or a new) space soon!

Oh, and nice new blog skin, Bea!

(click image for full-size shot)

The rig was fully self-contained, and had its own custom-crafted “travel case”. Just box it up and roll it on to a semi. Obscura also significantly improved the touch tracking this time around, with a combination of improved software, setup optimizations, and a new cocktail for the film on front. Like butter!

The app leveraged our existing WPF-based Multitouch framework, and featured playful drag-and-drop interactions, large “swiping” motions to navigate through content and some mild particle physics. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of the ergonomic design of large-format multitouch apps (low-dpi + big screen + close proximity = severe UX challenges), and are starting to fold some of these learnings back in to the framework.

Each “silo” highlighted a different aspect of GM’s efforts in exploring alternative fuels and greening their vehicles and production processes. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a video does a much better job of storytelling.

This video is from the Greenbuild Conference, the other shots are from the 2007 Electric Vehicle Show in Anaheim, CA ,where the wall surfaced for a repeat performance.

The silverlight.net customer showcase, built using Silverlight 1.0, enables users to rate , sort and browse Silverlight applications by category, country/region, tag and free search terms. Additionally, members of the Silverlight community can submit their applications for inclusion in the Showcase, and rate others’ work.

The previous Showcase had reached its breaking point and wasn’t scaling to keep up with all of the applications being developed. We architected an additive filtering system that disables any selections that would return an empty set of results — all of the filtering happens on the client side, not on the server. Microsoft was also very interested in highlighting the global reach of Silverlight, so countries and regions receive prominent display and filtering UI. Users can rate applications using a familiar rating paradigm.

Once again, the Step Change Group were rockstars on the backend, while we tackled UI design and all aspects of Silverlight development. We spent a good amount of time getting to know the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX library, leaning on it quite heavily to provide a solid infrastructure for development. All good things, expect more notes on our learnings and findings very soon.

This is our first Silverlight 1.0 project in the wild, executed in conjunction with the Step Change Group in Portland, OR. The app is completely data-driven, allowing Microsoft to use the same Silverlight application across all four product pages in the Expression Studio. The app parses runtime configuration variables passed in on the query string, and pulls from the very same XML data source used to build the non-Silverlight version of the page. In this way, the site can downgrade gracefully for platforms that don’t have an available plugin. All assets are shared with the HTML version as well, further lessening maintenance overhead.

We were particularly impressed with the butter-smooth framerates in the native Silverlight animation engine. Turns out it’s pretty straightforward to execute programmatic animations without a lot of code. It was also really quite simple to implement a full-featured, reskinnable, inline video player. No complaints with Silverlight, though it’s definitely taken some serious gear-grinding to switch from C# to JavaScript!