The Digital Living Room

Dale Herigstad: This room is actually an important one for us, because we deal with a lot of kind of unusual platforms, including game boxes, Slingbox, other technologies, other platforms, Windows Media Center. We have those in here, so the designers can come in and play with those technologies when they are here. So it feels kind of a living room. It's our digital living room. Brook Martin: We have complied a lot of our prototypes and media center applications in this room. We use this for our client preview. So if we have something we have edited together or a prototype that we would like to present to a client, we can bring him to this room to show them the application in a real living room environment or as we call it ten-foot environment where user is about 10 feet from the screen itself, to really get a real sense of what the application would look and feel like in a consumer's living room. Here are a couple of our prototypes that we have here that we can show. We have SlingCatcher from Sling Media that we helped build the interface for last year. A Voodoo, we didn't do anything for that particular interface but it tends to be a user interface we use for a lot of competitive analysis. The Xbox and the Wii are two platforms that we develop our applications for and UIs for rather routinely. And a PS3 because we like to play all the PS3 games. So this is a device that we are using called Prime Sense. It detects user gesture. I can navigate to this direction of screen by just holding up my hand and moving it through a series of navigation and content menus. To find more content in case I wanted to use this without a remote. But the Prime Sense sensor just simply detects video and 3D information to understand where I am in space and looks at -- knows where my head and shoulders are as well as my hands. One thing I want to show you is our surface table. This is just a sample application we use all the time to sort of look at different interaction models. You can interact and play with each of these and flick them and this is one of the first multi-touch applications. We use this for application development. A lot of our developers are spread across our many offices and so they will compile code and then we make it launch it here and then again our usability experts in our Ux department and the designers can actually see the results of all the development and user test it here. This one, for example, is a mapping application where you could zoom into different areas of world in almost real time. You can also turn around this so you can show it to somebody else and take them and navigate them through the experience. This form factor is also potentially meant to be used in a person's home so they can use this and connect it to a home media server, where they could have video, or audio, or music or images, vacation photos and things like that, served up to this device but they could also use this device to manage the playback or presentation of their photos and music and video throughout their home. So other connected devices such as Windows Media Center or some other music device like a Roku in your bedroom or something.