Observations from a 4 year old's first interaction with MS Surface

I thought this was interesting: "She found selecting, moving and orientating the photos very intuitive using natural gestures. She took a little guidance to get a handle on photo resizing but by the time she’d played for 15 minutes she had got to grips with it and could shrink and enlarge the photos with relative ease."<p>So moving images was easy and resizing them was hard. 15 minutes seems like a long time for a 4 year-old to learn a skill like that relatively well.<p>I think the conclusion you can draw from this, and the rest of the article, is that she could quickly do things that behaved exactly as they do in the real world (e.g. pushing a picture across a table), but things fell apart as soon as a new action had to be learned. That's why some of the actions seemed "intuitive," because they fit exactly into previous experience. I wonder if it would have been easier for her if they had played the "stretch a newspaper comic with silly putty" game a few days before.

I remember when the multi-touch first came out and everybody was excited. Few years and thousands of iphones have passed and the only "revolutionary" thing we can do with it is still zoom-in and zoom-out pinching pictures.<p>I am quite amazed by the resistance people have when thinking about HDI: take the multitouch pad on the new mac, for instance. I love it, but why there isn't even a way to do something like middle mouse button?

I was at TNRIS, a Texas GIS conference, and MS had a Surface there. I admit it was really cool to fly through Virtual Earth imagery with it, but it was pretty buggy. After a few minutes of light use I managed to freeze the interface, crashing the surface service, subsequently sending the machine back to the Vista desktop.<p>Unfortunately, this is my typical experience with most Microsoft software products.

Alternate title: "World's smallest person plays with an iPhone."

This is somewhat tangential to the story, but I think virtual painting, while novel, deprives a young child of the sensory experience necessary at that age.

When our kid was 2 and a few months we set him up with an old-school touchscreen. He had no problem playing games that would be hard for a 3.5 yr old with a mouse. May not sound like much, but a year at that age is huge, and even at 4, as the article states, kids are just barely getting the hang of a mouse. By 4, our kid was a mouse jockey. Transitioning from touchscreen to mouse was trivial.

Nice article, although this bit seemed a bit of a stretch:<p>&#62; This highlights how the direct manipulation and natural gestures of Microsoft Surface can blur the real and virtual world.<p>I can imagine that results may vary for people older than 4 years old.

Imagine that in the future, after enough Moore cycles, this amazing technology is shrunk down to a multi-touch device that can fit in your pocket!

The future is a big-ass table: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY</a>