DnD on Microsoft Surface Update

[rjdafoe]

And you can't know that there will be a significant market for it.
And considering how many "technological revolutions" turned out to be flops and that so far no one can think of anything which might be useful for consumers on surface I am pretty confident that surface too will not be "the next evolution" of the PC.



Just making it affordable doesn't mean that people will buy it. That microsoft makes a survey means that even they aren't sure if consumers will buy it. And only consumers would be interested in a surface PnP programm.

This technology would see more application when made into small tablets (sized like an Ereader, thus portable) which communicates with a central server in the house and can store data and access the web. That would be much more useful than a big, stationary "I can resize pictures but nothing really useful" surface.

Surface has a ton of applications. It can be the center of the entire moden house. Adjust your thermostat, light controls, display pictures, share music, probably even dial a telephone and speak to people.

Right now, we use Iphones to show other people youtube videos - and it is awkward and annoying trying to show more than 1 other person.

The applications are limitless. The hardware just has to be affordable - and I thnk $1500 is it - LCDs and Plasmas started to take off at about 1500 to 2k.

 

[Garmorn]

As for applications:

Kids
Kids love to touch things. Have painting programs, games where they can move puzzle pieces around, or control an action figure, or draw race tracks and then use a different part of the screen to control a car at the same time. Heck, that would be fun - you're driving, and you have one guy making the course, the other player trying to survive it.

If the screens can tilt, it makes it easy for them to show the class what they've drawn.

Get multiple kids all learning at the same computer workstation. Give them styluses and let them practice their handwriting.

Let them improve their spatial reasoning, by showing a labyrinth from top-down and first-person perspective. Heck, any sort of interactive teaching tool that kids can touch will probably sell like hotcakes. (The problem is, of course, when kids touch the screen after eating syruppy hotcakes.)


Engineering
Drafting, collaborating, manipulating stuff from different angles.

Ditto for art of any kind.


Video Games
If I touch here and here and rotate, the camera spins. If I move my fingers closer together, it zooms in, and if apart, it zooms out. If I move my fingers up or down on the screen, the camera raises or lowers. Great fun when you're exploring the beautiful vistas of some new RPG, or looking for clues in an adventure puzzle game.

Heck, you could play an FPS just as easily as with a keyboard and mouse. Your left hand controls the directions just as with WASD, plus any other buttons (which can be mapped more ergonomically, instead of having to rely on a keyboard), while your right hand aims and shoots (different weapons based on how many fingers you tap with.)

Rock Band's fun, right? Well, how about we get all experimental and give each person their own keyboard, which can be mapped to different instruments, so you can jam out with all sorts of crazy acoustic combinations. Or add in a freaky "paint the music" option where you dab your fingers in different sounds and slather them across the screen, trying to create a picture and music at the same time. It could be freeform, or you could have an Okami-style game where you have to use different types of sound to solve musical puzzles.

There are tons of things you can do with a touch screen, and as long as the engineers figure out a way to integrate everything a TV can do now with what a touch screen can also do, we'll all be out of maple syrup.

Or how about landscaping, crowd control, route planning. With GPS devices tracking of races like marathons, cross county skiing or hiking?

Any thing that requires multiple people to look, discus, and or minutiae it at the same time or as a group could use these.

 

[falcarrion]

I will not be suprised as far as multitouch tech will go. I have seen video games go from pong to what they are to day. I have seen home computers go from the comadore 64 and atari 400 to the beasts they are now. From having only landline phones to the small cellphones we have now. It wasn't so long ago that we didn't have the internet, routers, fax/scan/printers in our homes. Most of these things started out for business only to trickle down to the consumers.

 

[SkidAce]

I remember when the mouse came out for the computer. I recall telling my friend "No way this will catch on...a key board is so much faster for typing"'.

I hope my perspective has broadened a bit since then....

 

[Dannager]

I will say it now: if this product reaches consumer marketing, along with a commercial release of the SurfaceScapes 4e D&D client or something very similar, I will purchase it. I will find the money, and I will make it mine.

 

[vagabundo]

List them.

Surface is inferior for most consumer applications compared to a PC, Mobil or specialized input device.

Games? Can't do FPS and other mainstream games.

The DS and Ipod touch are hugely popular for gaming. What makes you think that this won't be?

It would be trival to enhance Natel/Wand/Wiimote game with screen multitouch; even if you needed a separate controler for twitch games like FPSs. But their are other popular genres out there that would work very well on multi touch.

Office applications? Don't need multitouch for that. Also, lack of keyboard and awkward screen to read from.

Your joking right? Watch any sci-fi movies? (minority report) for hints on how this could be very productive for office applications. In the near therm we are going to still want keyboards/mice, but they are going the way of the dinosaurs. Things are changing fast, mobiles are changing the way people use technology. Ipods and DSs are opening new ways for people to use things, this will filter into everything.

Art? Tablets (Wacom for example) already offer everything surface can do.
Picture Editing? Surface does not offer any advantages over a PC with Photoshop.

Have you ever used an watcom tablet? I do some sketching on one and I would prefer to see what I'm drawing on my tip of my pen, I could also do controls (like zoom, filters, ...) with my other hand through touch. It would be like night and day. Surface is perfect for art..

Video editing? You need massive processor power for that. Surface will hardly have that. Also, see picture editing.

Same as for office productivity, processing power is the only limit on this, but editing my touch would be so much quicker. Insert a 10/20 core processor and it will zip.

Media browsing like on an IPod? Get an Ipod. Its cheaper and portable.

No one will buy surface for board games, D&D and some odd, once in a year, applications. Its more something for businesses than for consumers.

Lots and lots of people will buy these products for a variety of reasons. I'm sure Sony a good coffee table/swivel design. It will be professionals/nerds/gadget freaks who will jump first but in a decade or two every house will have, at least, one of these devices, from Ipod size to 50inch living room. At some stage all TVs will come with multitouch as a feature.

Sure Samsung all ready sells a TV with Linux installed. Surface and its ilk is the future my man. PC's are on their way out.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

snip

Sure Samsung all ready sells a TV with Linux installed. Surface and its ilk is the future my man. PC's are on their way out.

I agree with all of what you said. I have just one quibble the PC is not on the way out though, it is the interface to it that is going to change. Of course wheither it is still a pc then is somewhat debatable. But a box with cpu, ram a hardrive and optical drive etc will sill bein the house but people will likely interact with it via touch screens or surface style interfaces and also probably their mobile phones.

 

[vagabundo]

I agree with all of what you said. I have just one quibble the PC is not on the way out though, it is the interface to it that is going to change. Of course wheither it is still a pc then is somewhat debatable. But a box with cpu, ram a hardrive and optical drive etc will sill bein the house but people will likely interact with it via touch screens or surface style interfaces and also probably their mobile phones.

I think I can agree with you; though their maybe a main house computer it will have thin client terminals or we might see a local cloud computing happening.

I can see it going the startrek model - lots of terminals both big and small and a large mainframe type deal.

It would be more server and PC TBH.

Obviously this will take some time, but I've been thinking about how to do it for my home setup.

 

[Scribble]

I'm really excited about the possibilities of this, but I agree with you entirely on the current offerings. It's a long way from being practical, but it's a start. Unfortunately the design behind the Microsoft Surface isn't set up to scale down in thickness well. But there's plenty of other multi-touch technologies that can scale in thickness, and I'm sure even more waiting to be invented that can potentially shrink that down to be placed anywhere.

That's all I'm really saying. The concept is awesome, but its current form is still too awkward for it to gain traction with the common household. Therefore it's a bit too early for "secondary" markets to start pouring R&D into it.

It's like back when MP3s were starting to take off. Some of the first mp3 players were CD players that could also play burnt MP3 files. The concept was awesome: I can carry hundreds of songs on one CD! Woohoo! But it was still to awkward to gain traction: You not only had to burn the CDs, but had to do so in a special way, and it was hard to navigate to the songs you wanted...

It wasn't until Apple started offering the ipod and itunes that made MP3 players really take off. Suddenly with onboard databases it was easy to navigate to the songs you wanted, you could just buy them online instead of burning a CD, the usb interface made transferring the songs a breeze, etc.

I just feel the surface lies in the same boat- It's got awesome concepts: Multi touch combined with object recognition, et al... But it's current form (a big giant coffee table thing that may or may not actually match my crate and barrel entertainment unit...) is just too awkward.

 

[Dausuul]

I just feel the surface lies in the same boat- It's got awesome concepts: Multi touch combined with object recognition, et al... But it's current form (a big giant coffee table thing that may or may not actually match my crate and barrel entertainment unit...) is just too awkward.

There's something to that... and I think I know what would move the Surface from awkward to slick and usable. It needs to become an actual surface, no more than a half-inch thick at most, which you can then set up anywhere you like - on a wall, on a table - heck, on the ceiling if that's where you need it.