Playing with Microsoft Surface at the Sheraton New York [video]

Playing with Microsoft Surface at the Sheraton New York

Originally uploaded by Square the A

For my last hurrah before school starts, I am spending the weekend in New York City. Today, I visited the Sheraton New York and played with Microsoft Surface – and what an experience it was!

Ever since watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, I fell in love by touch screen controls. I have been tracking Microsoft Surface since I first heard about it last year, and read the Sheraton had purchased the Microsoft Surface for five of it’s hotels – New York being one of them.

Microsoft Surface delievers that same kind of cool and wow factor as when I first played with the iPhone. In fact, it’s remarkably similar to the iphone in the way that you control it. What’s cool though, it that it recognizes multiple hands at once. The best way to describe it is to think of an iPhone on a coffee table. You can use your finger, your hand, two hands, multiple hands to select and move objects. It has directional control as well. Swiping or spinning in a direction will move the object that direction. Swiping something quickly, moves the object quickly – swiping slowly, move slowly. I had a lot of fun spinning the globe with the maps application and flicking photos from the Sheraton Photos app to all sides of the screen. It also doesn’t matter what side of the surface you are sitting on either, pressing the edge menu buttons will reorient the board based upon the button’s location.

Currently, the Microsoft Surface at the Sheraton has 3 applications along with the fishless aquarium-like screen saver: CityTips, Sheraton Snapshots, and Sounds of Sheraton. CityTips contains an interactive map with Clue game-looking cards where you can see locations of Services, Shopping, Restaurants, Bars and Clubs, Entertainment, Recreation, and Transportation. Clicking on the locations of one of these cards will put it up on map of NYC that will fill the Surface. The map was by far the most amazing piece – you can zoom in and out, rotate, and view both road and satellite versions. I was curious to see if it was limited to only NYC, but I quickly figured out that the whole earth was viewable.

Sheraton Snapshots is a photo album of various Sheraton locations around the world, You can choose between a photo album and bubble to view the photos. You can drag them off the bubble or album for a larger view. You can also zoom in and out and rotate the photos. Nothing significant with this app, except I had a lot of fun flicking all the photos all over the screen.

Sounds of Sheraton is like the Sheraton Snapshots except for music. From the menu, you choose a category, and an album. You can select songs from the album for your playlist by dragging the album off the menu, tapping on it and then choosing the songs you wish to play. There wasn’t a wide selection of songs to choose from and the sound from the Surface isn’t very loud.

Describing this can’t do it justice, so I used my macbook to my playtime with the Surface. As I was recording I noticed that if you hovered your hands over the surface, it recognized the movements. I immediately felt like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

Overall, I thought Microsoft Surface was simply amazing. I began to think about all the applications that can be used with Microsoft Surface. I began to think about all the adaptive and special education uses that Microsoft Surface could be used for. I can only hope that the $12,500 price tag will drop enough so we all can get one soon!

View the Microsoft Surface Flickr gallery here!