What can you do with a Microsoft Surface touch-screen computing table, other than use it as an expensive interactive kiosk in AT&T wireless stores? Design shop VectorForm has a few ideas. It has been pumping out prototype Surface apps for the last five months, and now has a Surface blog to document it all.
For pure tactile enjoyment, it’s hard to beat the Vector Drum Kit (see video above), which lets you bang away at the Surface using real drum sticks. Then there’s the SurfaceDJ, which lets you add or remove beats by placing small squares on a record-sized disc at the center of the table (see first video below). Plug that into your iPod, er, Zune, and you’ve got some pretty heavy artillery to pump out some tunes.
Then, of course, you can always use the Surface for more pedestrian apps, such as PowerPoint or as a kiosk. The last video below shows the BMW Konfigurator, which Vectorform created for BMW as an alpha prototype. You set a small model of the BMW car you want to learn more about on top of the Surface. It then brings up an interactive brochure, and you can change the color by placing different colored tiles on the table. I’m not sure you really need a huge Surface table for this, but it would make for a good sales pitch—until those little cars and tiles get lost or stolen.
Update: The BMW video has been pulled off of YouTube. Perhaps BMW didn’t like its plans being revealed.
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