A story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Lonely Planet, a travel guide publisher, is opening their first brick-n-mortar store at the Sydney Airport and it will include a Microsoft Surface with a Lonely Planet application. The application was built by Razorfish. You can see a video demo of it here.With all do respect to Razorfish I find the application rather uninspiring and little more than a gimmick for Lonely Planet. I guess that's a good thing for the debut of a new store, but if you watch the video it quickly becomes apparent (to me anyway) that people will not be to utilize the application in a meaningful way. I also think the design and aesthetics leave a lot to be desired. What do you think of the application?
4 comments:
I agree with you Richard. To be honest it was a bit tough to understand.
I don't know if I would really be colored as "disappointed", per se; Perhaps from the perspective of someone who already knows about a lot of NUI developments/reads the NUI forums/etc. it might seem disappointing...but I think you have to realize that most people have never even seen, let alone laid hands on, an MS Surface yet. So "unimaginative"? Perhaps. But from the POV of a normal person who has never seen or even heard of a computer screen "reacting" to objects placed on it this way, I would think this is actually fairly impressive. It may not really expose the whole range of "new NUI tech" to them, but at least it will get them thinking.
Hi GrapeApp,
I agree that its probably interesting to anyone new to multi-touch surfaces, but it could have been much better in my opinion. It doesn't have anything to do with features; its all about design and aesthetics and utility.
Also, I'm not sure what article you read because you use quotations around words like "disappointed", "unimaginative", "reacting", "new NUI tech" which I don't use in the blog post.
Anyway, your feedback is great! Thank you!
Richard
I suppose it does seem a bit clunky in the video - Just for the sake of discussion, what might you have done to improve the design?
I don't mean to challenge your assertion; I am just curious as to how a more seasoned hand might approach the design.
(Also - I use quotes, as a habit, to denote per se terms. While not entirely grammatically incorrect, I can see how that might be misleading in the context of a blog-post reply so I will attempt to stifle that habit in the future.)
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