Have you heard of Living Ink yet?

john.mullinax — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:47:00 GMT

My last post talked about an envisioning video that shows how we may use technology 10 years into the future. Turns out, not all of the technology concepts are that far away. In fact, one of the interesting technology innovations is already here: It’s called Living Ink.

Remember the very first scene in the actual envisioning video where the kids draw a dog and a ball on a collaborative display surface, and then “throw” the ball and the dog comes to life and chases it (about the 15:00 minute mark in the embedded video)?

We don’t have the collaborative display wall (darn!), but my kids have been making their drawings come to life at home since they got ItzaBitza for Christmas. It’s quite amazing, actually.

The kids draw scenes on the computer screen, and characters called sketchies interact with the drawings. Draw a door, and a sketchy can walk through it. Draw a tree, and it may start growing fruit. The sketchies help guide kids through the game to different scenes. Sometimes they’ll ask players to draw something specific, like a house. At other times, kids are free to explore the scenes by pursuing quests built into the game.

As an added bonus, ItzaBitza helps my three-year old son learn how to read… but even my 7 year old daughter, who can already read, enjoys playing because it’s so exciting to her to see her artistic creations come to life.

BTW, we use ItzaBitza at home on a tablet PC to make the drawing experience as “natural” as possible, but you can play using a regular PC as well, just drawing with the mouse, and it’s still fun. I think our next PC will be a large touch screen to take advantage of Windows 7’s built in multi-touch capabilities, so that should open up the screen real-estate for an even more immersive ItzaBitza drawing experience.

ItzaBitza is a made by a children’s software startup called Sabi, which was founded in partnership with Microsoft’s IP Ventures Program. It costs about $20. Well worth the money, IMO, but also, check out what USA Today had to say.

Technorati Tags: Living Ink,natural interaction,windows 7,multi-touch,user experience,microsoft ip ventures

You can play with Microsoft Surface today!

john.mullinax — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:56:59 GMT

If you live in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio, or San Francisco, that is. That's because today marks the debut of Microsoft Surface in a production, retail environment. AT&T is using Microsoft's revolutionary Surface tabletop computing device to help consumers compare cell phones.

The NY Times has more on what AT&T is doing here. I have more on Microsoft Surface here. For me, what makes Microsoft Surface is really special is that it brings 4 things together in an elegant way:

Multi-touch computing -- that is, the computer can receive and process multiple simultaneous inputs. A traditional mouse driven human-machine interface handles only one input at a time: click here, and then click there.
Machine vision -- a series of infrared cameras inside the table make sure that the computer knows what's happening on the surface. This is used for object recognition -- items placed on the table are identified by dot patterns stuck on the objects that the cameras capture and the PC inside the table recognizes.
The beautiful, immersive user interface. Designed and implemented with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). You may not have machine vision and multitouch on your PCs yet, but with WPF (write your own and/or use these controls) you can have beautiful, elegant applications that make your life easier and better.
The table form factor. The fact Surface is basically just a Windows Vista PC with some fancy peripherals and special mutli-touch interface is significant -- it portends a future of intelligent objects that are simply part of our environment. Perhaps somewhere Mark Weiser is smiling? :-)

BTW, If you don't know about Mark Weiser's work, he's often considered the father of ubiquitous computing and identified four principles for ubiquitous computing -- listed by Wikipedia as:

The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
Technology should create calm (where "calm technology" is "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention").

Technorati Tags: Surface,ubiquitous computing,multi-touch,WPF,machine vision,Mark Weiser

Beyond | IT : multi-touch

Have you heard of Living Ink yet?

You can play with Microsoft Surface today!