Long Zheng has found a great video from Microsoft Research which shows that by using the best attributes of both touch and pen input a very function application can be made then in some ways replicates the real world very well. This application was designed to work on Microsoft’s Surface.
Some of you may now I am quite the fan of great UX and UI and I have to say this looks to be an excellent UX which seems to follow in an increasing number of similar productivity/design experiences from Microsoft with applications like Project Gustav. Apple may well have brought touch interface to the masses in their iPod Touch and iPhone but it looks to me that Microsoft are doing the most to innovate in the application of the touch screen.
With this being a Microsoft Research project it could mean that this never comes to market however immediately a product sprung to mind when I saw this, Courier. In the concept videos that have been shown of Courier the use of both pen and finger work well together and could have come from the work done on this project. The concept videos show Courier to have more features than shown in the above video, however with the Courier videos being concepts it likely that those features don’t actually work on a real device. The video above does clearly show that Microsoft can indeed go some way to achieving the functionality seen in the Courier concept which makes me think the functionality of the concept videos could well be replicated on a physical device.
I have been wary of getting my hopes of for how good Courier will be, if it ever comes to market, as we have only seen concept videos but I am now a little more confident that what we have seen in the videos will indeed be similar to how the device will work. As far as I can tell Courier, if it does exist, wont be coming to market until 2011, even though I want to believe Engadget who say it will be out by the end of the year which is a shame because I could happily use it today.
