Picture God taking a peek at the universe, rotating planets with his mighty arms, going from the Earth to Jupiter with a single gesture, and speeding, slowing and reversing time with the movement of an index finger. That will look somewhat like what Microsoft Surface researcher David Brown is doing in the clip below with his superb space app dubbed NUIverse. The app is simply marvellous!

From the demonstration, you will get to know about the awesome multi-touch capabilities of Microsoft Surface and the computational power of the Samsung SUR40 which runs NUIverse (anagram of the word universe and NUI stands for natural user interface, in case you didn’t notice).

If you own a smartphone, you might be familiar with a lot of NUI gestures such as grabs, twists and swipes. You will find all those being used by Brown, but the new app is much more than that. He is utilizing gestures to move about in the universe in both time and space, and using on-screen dials for controlling effects such as the camera FOV and the passage of time. He is even using transparent disks which can be placed on the screen and moved. The disk provides him with details of the objects it covers.

But, a good video is sometimes better than a thousand words, right? So, head below to know more about the app.

The thing, on which it runs, by the way, comes with a price tag of $9,049 (including the stand). The application is not slowed down at any point all thanks to the power of the SUR40. And we are not sure whether the app will be available commercially, but we might see it used for educational purposes in the future. It will be great if they release the program for planetariums.

You can close your mouth now and check out another video which shows the on-screen action of the app in use. The music in this video is kinda cool.

The post The NUIverse Space App Will Let You Play God (Video) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The first generation Microsoft Surface seemed like such a novel product, but it didn’t quite get as widespread an adoption rate as some folks may have hoped. Well, the second Surface is now available for pre-order in over 23 countries and it brings some fun innovations to the table (terrible pun intended).

The Microsoft Surface 2 was a joint project with Samsung and it bears the model name SUR40. The fundamental concept is the same: it’s a table with a giant touchscreen on it and this touchscreen can recognize certain objects that are placed on it. However, much like the move in tablets and smartphones, the Surface 2 SUR40 is significantly slimmer and sleeker than its predecessor.

Rather than having a bulky pedestal to house its internals, as was the case with the original, the Surface 2 is able to get all of its components integrated into the 40-inch multitouch display. They used Microsoft’s PixelSense technology to slim things down, getting rid of the five camera array in the first Surface. The new Surface can track up to 50 touch points at the same time.

The release date hasn’t been announced yet, but they’re pegging the price at right around $8,400.

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