Just had a look at this awesome prototype from Microsoft. I am loving what Microsoft is up to these days, researching and developing some great new UIs and interaction mechanisms. Have a look at this Microsoft Manual Deskterity prototype video and you’d love it too!

Pen and touch computing have long-thought to be mutually exclusive methods of human-computer interaction, but as the Microsoft Research project “Manual Deskterity” shows, the two intuitively combined makes for a much powerful input method than each of them might ever be on their own.

If you’re short on time, the real soul of the demo – a custom application for the Microsoft Surface with a special infrared pen – starts at the 1 minute mark and shows off capabilities that either wouldn’t be practical or possible at all by either pen or touch alone. Bear in mind however this is a research project so the application is quite limited in scope.

— I Started Something

I just hope it makes it out of their research labs and into our hands soon.