A good sign for a growing developer community is when new tools pop up and experiences are shared in the open. Lately more and more developers have gotten in touch with Microsoft Surface, and it has resulted in several code projects on Codeplex. I want to digitally high five the teams for sharing their work with us. In my opinion the fastest way to a mature developer community is through sharing knowledge and experience, which is exactly what the Surface and NUI community needs.
A quite usuful project web is the Surface Academy 2009 Toolkit. On the project web the Microsoft Surface Academy has put up a couple of controls and a card game starter kit. Thank you, guys!
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onsdag 9 september 2009
onsdag 25 februari 2009
Surface training
When me and Jouni were at the Surface training in Munich Jouni wrote an application that uses the raw images from the cameras. The table consists of five cameras, four cameras that take pictures of the corners and one that takes a picture in the center. Then there is a process that goes from the raw images to a binary version of the image with each pixel either black or white for faster processing. The screen is divided into a grid containing one-inch squares. The next step is to place each frames contact data into shared memory and tell the SDK that data is available and ready to use.
The fact that cameras are used and not just a touch screen is what makes Microsoft Surface so special. Things that happen on the surface are recognized and even things that happen above the surface are noticed. About one inch above things starts to happen.
The course that we attended took place at one of Microsoft’s Technology Centers (MTC). There are three MTC in Europe, Dublin, Paris and Munich. On these centers Microsoft have three types of offerings, Strategy Briefing, Architecture Design Session and Proof of Concept Workshop. The center was really great even if the lunch was a logistical challenge. You can read more about the centers here: http://www.microsoft.com/mtc/default.mspx
I had to try Jounis application and the quality of the images that you get from the cameras with my face. "Thank god they can be cleaned was Dr Niels diagnosis."
The resulting image
Jouni in action
tisdag 17 februari 2009
Surface training
On Wednesday last week, me and Jouni (the other writer on this blog) went to Munich in Germany to attend one of the first Surface developer courses outside of Redmond. Teacher was Dr Neil Roodyn from Australia. Dr Neil has been working with the Surface team for almost a year, developing applications and giving training. This was one of three occasions in Europe.
Dr. Neil Roodyn
The course was titled Building Applications for Microsoft Surface and lasted two days. We were 16 attendees and had two lovely Surface tables at our disposal.
Dr Neil talked a lot about the Surface vision and the history about the table, how it all started and how it came to be what it is today. The work with the Surface table started back in 2001 and in 2005 it got the current look and feel. In 2007 the first public pictures appeared and at PDC in 2008 it was made available to the public. If it took Microsoft seven years to get Surface to the public I can’t help thinking about what kind of projects they are starting right now that we will se more of in 2015!
It is really important to think of Microsoft Surface as something else then just a big touch enabled screen. Cause if touch is all that you are looking for then there are much cheaper solutions! Now the unique thing with Microsoft Surface is the interaction with what happens on and above the surface of the Surface.
Thanks to the vision recognition system Surface is able to detect things on top of the actual surface. About an inch from the surface things are starting to get picked up by the cameras. This information for instance used to detect fingers and the orientation of the finger.
As usual when you attend a course and have some knowledge of the subject, the first hours or the first day is not really challenging. Although Dr Neil managed to keep my interest and soon we got to start writing code and play with the tables.
One interesting thing to see on the table compared to the simulator is when you have recognized a tagged object and move it fast over the surface. The vision recognition system is not able to track that it is a tagged object that moves and it becomes a blob instead. But when you stop moving it is recognized as a tag again and the TagVisualizer is animated to the new spot. On the simulator you can move a tagged object with a TagVisualizer at any speed with no problem.
One part of the course was focused on unpacking, configuring and setting up the table. This part was really good since we haven’t gotten our table yet. It was also great to talk to Dr Neil about different deployment and development environment strategies. He had some interesting thoughts about how to use Live Mesh with Surface that I will try.
Anyway a really great course but I would have enjoyed more time coding and hands-on Surface-time!
Dr. Neil Roodyn
The course was titled Building Applications for Microsoft Surface and lasted two days. We were 16 attendees and had two lovely Surface tables at our disposal.
Dr Neil talked a lot about the Surface vision and the history about the table, how it all started and how it came to be what it is today. The work with the Surface table started back in 2001 and in 2005 it got the current look and feel. In 2007 the first public pictures appeared and at PDC in 2008 it was made available to the public. If it took Microsoft seven years to get Surface to the public I can’t help thinking about what kind of projects they are starting right now that we will se more of in 2015!
It is really important to think of Microsoft Surface as something else then just a big touch enabled screen. Cause if touch is all that you are looking for then there are much cheaper solutions! Now the unique thing with Microsoft Surface is the interaction with what happens on and above the surface of the Surface.
Thanks to the vision recognition system Surface is able to detect things on top of the actual surface. About an inch from the surface things are starting to get picked up by the cameras. This information for instance used to detect fingers and the orientation of the finger.
As usual when you attend a course and have some knowledge of the subject, the first hours or the first day is not really challenging. Although Dr Neil managed to keep my interest and soon we got to start writing code and play with the tables.
One interesting thing to see on the table compared to the simulator is when you have recognized a tagged object and move it fast over the surface. The vision recognition system is not able to track that it is a tagged object that moves and it becomes a blob instead. But when you stop moving it is recognized as a tag again and the TagVisualizer is animated to the new spot. On the simulator you can move a tagged object with a TagVisualizer at any speed with no problem.
One part of the course was focused on unpacking, configuring and setting up the table. This part was really good since we haven’t gotten our table yet. It was also great to talk to Dr Neil about different deployment and development environment strategies. He had some interesting thoughts about how to use Live Mesh with Surface that I will try.
Anyway a really great course but I would have enjoyed more time coding and hands-on Surface-time!
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