on 01 October 2009Forget for a moment the toe-curling commentary and soft-lighting in this promotion clip, many still consider this effort from Sheraton Hotels to be the best example of Microsoft Surface in action.
The reason? It combines all the concierge facilities that a typical hotel would include offline (at a desk, in other words) into a single interactive application.
Developers and Surface engineers in the UK and North America agree that very few applications in any vertical market have come close to reproducing this as yet.
Perhaps the worrying conclusion from that is the fact that the Sheraton app was built almost 18 months ago and, as yet, nobody has taken it on further.
Nevertheless, TravelTainment’s Surface app for travel agents, revealed here yesterday, might give it a run for its money, at least in terms of integration with an offiline environment.
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The power of Microsoft Surface is unleashed when it recognizes, connects and communicates with a device. The Surface device houses five cameras inside the unit which reads information from data tags and triggers events when physical objects are placed on the surface. What is equally fascinating is that Microsoft Surface’s most compelling feature, and the feature that sets Microsoft Surface apart from other touch screen technologies is this object recognition, yet the Virtual Concierge application, which regularly gets the plaudits as the best Surface application doesn’t utilize object recognition.
Hear Hear…
Both Kevin, and Rich.
We’re not challenging enough on Surface apps right now. Many (not all) of the apps out there are self-contained and very shallow in terms of their true functional capability.
Where the objective is to provide a few moments of entertainment, then that’s fine – but when it’s in a bank, or a travel agent, we have to be more demanding.
We have to (like the Sheraton app does) mirror the real-life processes, but use the power of the device to make the experience of those things better and more powerful.
In an early stage of any technology, we always see a plethora of ‘proof’ applications. Things designed and built quickly to see if there is an opportunity to do more in that space.
This is a spot on approach – any product design process should go through a stage like this to test the case for further investment. However, I don’t think people are being honest enough about what they have, and more importantly, haven’t done.
Let’s be open about our learnings, and use them, to go on to build the apps that we really need. Apps that use data created in bookings, or from our social networks, and allow us to create things that can be taken back out to the outside world, either for us to carry on our mobile, or share with our families back home.
For now though, I agree that Sheraton is indeed the current best app in Travel on Surface.
This is a great add-on to the concierge service, but I hope they dont honestly think this could replace it all together? I may be about to sound 40 years old than I am, but I do want to deal with a live person sometimes.
For example, I know longer go to the grocery store near my office because they switched to 100% self service check outs. I dont see the value in that, and like Rich and Paul said, its just a novelty unless someone taps in to the true potential.