Kristof Rennen’s Blog

Yesterday, elections took place in Belgium.
As with any election show, TV stations always do their best to impress people watching as much as they can.

VTM chose to use the Microsoft Surface during their show as the first one in belgium using this new technology for a real purpose.

The application itself consisted of 3 scenes used by the presenter to go through the results as they were gathered throughout the day:

• A startup scene
• A coalition scene
• An evolution scene

The startup scene

The startup screen showed the logo of “De Stem Van Vlaanderen”, the same one as used on the plasma screens behind the presenters.

The coalition scene

This scene was used to navigate through all the possible coalition combinations between the 7 big factions.

An overview of all factions is shown, which can be expanded or collapsed showing the total number of seats reached by that faction.

By dragging the faction itself into a pie, 3D pie pieces visualize the possible coalitions.

The evolution scene

This scene is used to show the evolution of factions and cartels between the elections of 2004, 2007 and 2009.

By dragging the title of the faction into the bar below, the results of that faction are shown.

By using different discs the results from all the factions could be visualized in an interactive fashion.

This shows us how nicely a Surface can be integrated into any environment, and according to me the application really looks nice so they gain my vote

Let’s hope they will come up with various nice applications in the future.

Kristof Rennen Development Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Surface

In my previous article, I talked a little about the inside and outside of a Microsoft Surface unit. To actually start developing Surface applications, a few more steps are required.

Prerequisites

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 with C# Project features
• Microsoft Windows Vista 32 bit
• Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 2.0 (available here)
• Microsoft Surface Development Kit (not publicly available)
• A minimum screen resolution of 1280 x 960

Creating projects

After the installation of the prerequisites is done, extra templates have been added to Visual Studio to be able to create new Surface projects.

 

There are 2 options to create a new Surface project:

• Using WPF
• Using XNA

I will be choosing WPF now, so when the new project is created a basic structure is foreseen which looks like this:

Following files are already available:

• A first surface window
• An app.xaml to initialize the application
• An application xml file to describe the application (description, name and icons)
• Some resources

Running projects

There are 3 possibilities to run a Surface application:

• As a standard windows/wpf executable
• On a Surface unit itself
• Inside the Surface simulator

Any Surface application can be started as any regular wpf/windows application by double clicking on the executable, or by hitting F5 inside Visual Studio.

The application will then look like this:

The second way of running a surface application, is by running it on a surface unit or inside the surface simulator.

Surface Simulator

The surface simulator is an application installed when you install the Surface sdk. It simulates a multi touch device, by supporting multiple mice, tags, … anything which is supported by a real Surface unit.

The simulator can be found here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Surface\v1.0\Tools\Simulator\SurfaceSimulator.exe

When multiple mice are attached to the computer, they can all be used to interact with the application although working with multiple mice on a single computer is not really easy

If you are like me running on a screen resolution less than 1280 x 960, you will receive following error message unable to run the simulator. I’m going to try to find a solution for this so I can develop surface application on my laptop as well.

To run the application inside the simulator, you have to make sure the simulator is running before you start the application. When the simulator is running, and you start the application using the executable or by hitting F5 inside visual studio, the simulator will show the application:

Conclusion

Now that we have our environment set up, we can start developing our kick ass Surface applications. The development itself is more or less the same as WPF development. Only a few controls have a specific Surface control which needs to be used (SurfaceButton, SurfaceCheckbox, SurfaceWindow, …)

An important tip when starting with surface development is not only relying on the simulator to test the applications. It’s really needed to test the application properly on a real unit as well since the interaction with multiple people around the application is a lot different than running it on a single machine with multiple mice.

In the coming weeks I will be posting a little more on my experiences while developing one of our Surface applications, so stay tuned.

Kristof Rennen Development Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Surface

As of today, we are working on a Microsoft Surface application which gave me the idea starting to blog about news, features, nice to knows, … anything you may want to know about the Microsoft Surface and the development of Surface applications.

In this first article, I will be talking about the Surface in general, and what it is all about.

The Idea

Microsoft Surface fundamentally changes the way we deal with digital content on a computer.

Instead of working with a dull mouse and keyboard, which is not very intuitive to all users, we will be using our hands and fingers to operate the Microsoft Surface.

We can grab data with our hands, move it around by performing simple gestures, and this even with multiple persons simultaneously.

All computers only have a single input device which is the mouse. The surface on the other hand is a full multi-touch device, supporting up to 52 touch points (that are a lot of mouses).

The Outside

The Surface itself it built as a small table, where the plate itself is the multi touch device.

Because it looks so natural, it can easily be included in various surroundings.

The surface of the Surface, is a kind of matted glass material, feeling really soft to the fingers, and allowing fast movement.

The viewing angle and brilliancy of the screen is made so a lot of users can have a clean image, when surrounding the table.

The Inside

The inside of consists of 3 major parts:

• Near infrared camera’s
• A computer
• Rear projection system

In total, there are 5 camera’s monitoring the surface for movement tracking. The reason Microsoft uses 5 camera’s, is to solve field angle problems. Each camera monitors it’s own small area of the surface, resulting in better speed and resolution. It was also needed to get the table as low as it is now.

The camera’s themselves can read unlimited numbers of touch points on the surface. The limit of 52 is only set because of CPU processing limits.

The computer inside the Surface is a high-end machine, but runs on mainly conventional components. It is powered by a Core 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz CPU, and has 2GB of RAM.

The Operating System on the surface computer, is a standard non-modified Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. An extra layer is running on top of this windows vista, called the shell.

The read projection system, projects the computer’s image to the underside of the tabletop.

Communication

The Surface offer 3 ways of communication:

• WiFi
• Ethernet
• Bluetooth

There are already sample application using the WiFi possibilities to automatically load content from a wireless device, if put on the Surface.

Development

To develop Surface application, there is a choice between Windows Presentation Foundation and XNA. Custom WPF control have been built to support the Surface specific interactivity.

The development can be done using the Microsoft Surface SDK, which integrates with Visual Studio 2008 and allows the developers to run a Surface Simulator to test the application locally on a windows vista machine.

Technical Specifications

Size: 108 x 69 x 54 CM
Weight: ca 90kg

Network:

• IEEE802.11b
• IEEE802.11g
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Gigabit Intel Network Adapter

I/O:

• 2 headphone jacks
• 6 USB 2.0 ports
• RGB component video
• S-VGA video (DB15 external VGA connector)
• Component audio
• Ethernet port (Gigabit Ethernet card [10/100/1000])
• External monitor port
• Bays for routing cables
• On/Standby power button

 Display:

• Type: 30-inch XGA DLP® projector
• ATI X1650 graphics card with 256 MB of memory
• Maximum resolution: 1024 x 768
• Lamp mean-life expectancy: 6,000+ hours

Computing System:

• 2.13-GHz Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo processor
• Memory: 2 GB dual-channel DDR2
• Storage: Minimum 250 GB SATA hard-disk drive

More Information

More information can be found at the following locations:

• The Official Website
• The Surface Blog

In one of my coming articles, I will be talking about Microsoft Surface Development.

Kristof Rennen Hardware Hardware, Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Surface