Microsoft Surface

A few weeks ago, I tagged along with my husband, who’s in the tech industry, and went to the CODE conference in the south bay area. While I was there I got to see and play around with the Microsoft Surface.

I checked out some of the music applications that have been developed so far, which were pretty cool. The music program featured an interactive piano, where you could touch the screen and push down on the keys to create sound. There was a DJ program, as well, allowing scratching and mixing. What was missing, of course was haptic feedback- actually having the sensation of touching the keys or record and pushing them down or from side to side.

A paint program was also demonstrated. They had something that looked like an artist’s palette, that when dropped down on the surface the circles that were cut out (representing where the paint would go) turned different colors- for example, one red, one pink, one blue and one yellow. They also had regular paint brushes, which were “dipped” into the virtual paint inside the palette, and then you could apply color anywhere on the screen. It made me so excited! There’s lots more to be done to make this a useful tool for art making- for example, being able to mix colors together, and having gradients of color (similar to Art Rage). However, a product like this makes the idea of Cyber-Art Therapy come alive in my mind.

Here’s a demo video I found that demonstrates some of what I described above.