Ok firsthand, let me qualify the title that this is "part of the vision". Now, you might have seen this great video of Microsoft's Vision for 2019 of what software and hardware might look like, and how we might interact with it in the future. It is really fascinating stuff, especially for a technology and UX enthusiast like myself. Anyway so, I wanted to create a demo app for my shiny new framework (which you can read up on other posts), and I kinda thought the kind of interactivity in the video is what my framework is all about - so I went out to replicate the UI using my little framework called nRoute.
Here are a couple of snapshot of the original UI, I referenced:
I created the demo app with Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008 (no Illustrator or Photoshop) in about 2 days - faster than I though I would. However, my work is rather preliminary, as I want to really develop on these concepts with Silverlight 3 and all the goodness that it brings. In fact, with the Silverlight 3 version of this app, I plan to feature much more of visuals shown in the original video (hello perspective 3D and multi-touch). Below are some grabs of my interpretation:
Currently the application is very light on content, as it was primarily designed to showcase the technical marvels of the nRoute Framework ;) but given some time and inclination I think we can have a little piece of the future rather soon.
To run the demo click here (uses Silverlight 2) and for the source code visit http://nRoute.codeplex.com. BTW, I call this app the "Future Desktop".
UPDATE: for those technically inclined, this post goes over the nRoute-related features showcased in this demo app