Hi all,

last week my son's teacher asked whether there were dads who wanted to come and talk about their daytime job in class. Although I drop off the kids at school in the morning (not every day) I don't get to spend a lot of time with them in and around school. Therefor I thought it was a nice idea and proposed to put a Surface table in their classroom for the day.

This Sunday I spent a couple of hours creating two very basic games that they could play on the machine.

The first one is a version of the game memory, the second one is a sound-based game. All in all I spent around five hours developping both games, so don't expect high-end games ! But I achieved my goals: the kids had a wonderfull time !

I have added some screenshots, some pictures from the day itself and a zip file containing the code.

 Memory Game (three player mode)

 

 Memory game (using colors as cards)

 

 Sound game (try to remember the order of the sounds played by the app)

Maybe you can have some fun time with your kids and these games as well.

Enjoy !

boris

KidsGames.zip (1.46 mb)

PS. This code has been created on one afternoon, so this is not production quality code.

Last wednesday I presented a lunch session at the TechDays2010 in Belgium entitled "How we created 'De Kinderpuzzel'". This session was about a Microsoft Surface project we did for the Flemish Television and the production house Koeken Troef !.

The slides that I used for this presentation you can see below (just click on the link).

 

 

You can now watch the presentation on channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/liese/TechDays-2010--Developer-Walkthrough-how-we-built-De-Kinderpuzzel/If I understood correctly the video of this presentation will become available on Channel9. As soon as this happens I'll post a link here.For now, you can already have a look at the excellent keynote by Anders Hejlsberg.

For one of our Surface related projects we needed to create a scrolling panel that makes the centered item look bigger. In top of that the items should grow gradually as they approach the center and shrink again as they move away.

The idea I implemented to achieve this effect is to bind the ScaleX and ScaleY properties of the ScaleTransform for the content images to a Gauss-curve. The following picture shows these normal distributions. Using the parameters of the functions you can easily control the height, width and position of the curve. This enables us to create the fish-eye effect.

I used the standard formula (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function):

for some real constants a > 0, b, c > 0, and e ≈ 2.718281828 (Euler's number). The graph of a Gaussian is a characteristic symmetric "bell curve" shape that quickly falls off towards plus/minus infinity. The parameter a is the height of the curve's peak, b is the position of the centre of the peak, and c controls the width of the "bell".

Using a, b and c we can thus control the shape of the bell and hence the shape of the Fish-Eye.

The final result looks like this:

I have included a demo-project showing the code for a proof-of-concept control. Please feel free to use the code but bear in mind that this is not production code and it is provided as is. If you feel like it, just let me know what you think about it and whether you are using it. All other comments, ideas or suggestions are also welcomed.

FishEyeScrollPanel.zip (1,96 mb)

Recently the IBBT (the Flemish Institute for Broadband Technologies) organized a contest: INCA - Innovative and Creative Applications. In this competition you get one month of time to create an application that is either innovative, creative or both :-)

We created 'Tableau'. This application provides a customer a simple and intuitive way of finding his way around the S.M.A.K. museum.

It can be seen as a virtual and interactive guide to the museum and the art works in the museum. Although the application was created for a museum, it could be used for a large number of other venues: 

• Libraries
• Public space (city hall, ...)
• Musea
• Public services (fire department, police, etc.)
• ...

Some key concepts we have tried to add to the application: 

• Intuitve: The multi-touch interface helps to make the application accessible without any prior knowledge. 
• Natural: The way in which the art can be looked at, rotated, resized, etc is very natural to the user.
• Social: The application not only can be used by multiple people simultaneously, it also inspires people to interact with each other.  
• Super-real: the real and the virtual merge together, e.g. through interaction with physical objects.
• Spatial: The application can be used from all sides of the surface table. The appliation supports 360 degrees use.
• Accessible: The application has been developed to be accessible by as much people as possible (enabled and disabled, children and elderly people)

You can see a short demonstration video below (Thanks to the S.M.A.K. museum for making available their wonderful art collection. 

Tableau: low resolution(11MB)  - high resolution (115MB)

Hi all,

I have added two features to the tool as requested by a number of people that are using it. You can now:

1. Show the byte numbers in the center of the tag
2. Show the page number on each page that is printed

Hopefully these little changes can help someone print ByteTags. Let me know should you require some other or more features. 

SurfaceTagPrinting_2.zip (1.30 mb)

Update (15/03/2009 - 16:09): I have fixed the "show bounding box" issue. Pleas download the new version below.

A Microsoft Surface unit comes with a limited amount of ByteTags that you can use to have the surface recognize objects. While testing some of the applications that we are developing ByteTags are used. I wanted to create a little tool that allows me to create the tags I need easily.

Therefore I decided last night I to create a small application that allows the creation of ByteTags. I haven't put to much time in creating this, but the following functionality should be available:

• Select the tags that you want to print
• Indicate how many times a certain tag needs to be included
• Limited layout option for printing your tags (page size, page margins, tag margins)
• Printing the tags. I have tested them on our surface unit and they seem to be recognized correctly.

One issue I haven't been able to solve yet is the 'Tag Bounding Box'. Currently the application always draws a bounding box around each tag. For some reason my databinding on the checkbox is not working :-(

I would like to add the generation of IdentityTags as well, but haven't found the specification for those. Please, drop me a line of you can help me out there. I will then add that functionality to the tool.

Feel free to play around with the tool. If you have any questions, remarks or feature requests: let me know! Also if you are interested in the source code of the project drop me a line. I'm currently not posting it publicly because it needs to be cleaned up first. 

Disclaimer: Read the instruction on printing byte tags in the SDK carefully. Not all printers produce the same results.

SurfaceTagPrinting_fix.zip (1.28 mb)