Inside the Touch Pack for Windows 7: Lagoon
This afternoon, via ‘the blog’, Microsoft revealed the new Touch Pack for Windows 7 featuring six new touch-enabled applications (toys) to be installed on touch-supported hardware (at the OEM’s discretion of course). While all the toys are nice, the first to catch my eye was the photo-realistic fishy Microsoft Surface Lagoon screensaver. It features a photo realistic set of images put together to form a vivid 3D environment for the fishies to swim around and enjoy. Touching the display while the screensaver is going results in ripple formation – consistent with a finger being inserted in the water (i tested in my real aquarium) – and even draws the fish near while keeping your finger dry. Very nice!
On the technical side, Lagoon is an in-house XNA-powered application that utilizes GPU shader models 2 and 3 for the eye candy goodness, depending on availability and rendering performance. (This means your EeePC is out of the question.) While it supports custom backgrounds and variable amounts of fish, it does not support the creation of rich environments, placement of 3D objects, or feeding.
kinda… random, if you ask me.
Well that’s useless. Cause I wanna interact with my screen saver while I am at my PC.
I bet you guys got a bonus with this thing too.
Now if this could be a wallpaper/logon screen then that would be something different. Still just as useless. But something else to do while waiting for something to download/process.
How about you guys go about making visual customization of the OS something more to enjoy?
Screensavers are kindof obsolete with the advent of the LCD, because it doesn’t need warmup, you just set it to shutoff when you aren’t using it.
Pip,
I don’t think this was suppose to be a practical addition to Win 7. I was first a Surface application and more well suited for the uses of that platform. That being said, the touch capabilities of Win 7 make the Surface Lagoon a fun and tech-novelty way to show off multi-touch abilities of the new OS. It’s cool and fun to play with. It can also make your multi-touch PC in the living space feel more invited. I would love to have a tablet PC and just sit on the coffee table in tablet mode. Family passing by can see the fish and I can ivite them to touch…or i would just watch and play with it while i wait or sip some coffee.
What I find the biggest part is that this was designed with XNA. :) …It really is exciting to see XNA popup in a variety of places. I want to see the future of how XNA is opening doors and starting a nice cross platform development trend.
Well… it’s random, but it’s also relaxing.
Now only if they make the fish and the rest of the aquarium like the gorgeous aquarium screensaver they had licensed from SereneScreen! While the concept is cool, this feels like a demo/Hello World app.
They should make it freely available to everyone, touch screen or not, for use as a screensaver, DreamScene, or Welcome screen backdrop (good idea Pip).
@Yert, perhaps that’s why most of the themes in Win 7 have No Screensaver set at all.
XNA is doing great job. And with the new release, I guess we will see more applications built on XNA in the following years.