Below is a fun little spot for Microsoft Mexico that dropped right before Christmas last year. The piece was created by Homeboy for Wunderman agency and Microsoft. Featuring a vibrant color pallet, flat graphics, and organic transitions, the animation stays true to Microsoft’s branding and the look and feel created for Windows Mobile, and the Metro interface used in Windows 8. The story line is an entertaining journey from Earth to outer space passing by the Microsoft product line including the now Microsoft owned Nokia phone line. What is great about this fun little spot is it reads well with no dialog and could be reused in multiple markets world wide with little to no effort. It’s fun, and fun is always a winner.
If you are a designer or artist working with digital tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, you might have had a chance to work with the Wacom Cintiq. If you are unfamiliar with the Cintiq, it is Wacom’s monitor/input tablet combined. It allows you to draw and paint right on the surface, mimicking an actual physical work surface.
If you are an iPad or other tablet user, you have probably installed a few creative apps like Procreate, or ArtRage and use your tablet for sketching, drawing, photo-retouching, etc. with some kind of input stylus. And while your stylus does a pretty good job, in many ways it is not a substitute for your Wacom tablet or Cintiq. The fact is most styluses, have larger input tips, and almost all of them don’t offer pressure sensitivity like the Wacom. So, why hasn’t Wacom jumped into the tablet fray? Well they have.
The Wacom Cintiq Companion, and Comanion Hybrid are two new tablets from Wacom. The Companion runs a full blown version of Windows 8 and allows you full access to all of your desktop creative tools. The Companion Hybrid runs Android and give you access to all of your favorite Android creative apps, like Procreate, Sketch, and ArtRage.
Both tablets offer an immersive on-screen creative experience and take full advantage of Wacom’s pressure sensitive stylus on a high resolution portable screen. The Companion running Windows 8 is essentially a mobile workstation with multi-touch control, pressure sensitive input and cloud based connectivity allowing you to create and share you r work from anywhere. Frankly I find this to be very exciting, because it take what I do on my iPad and extends it allowing me to be more creative from anywhere.
The overall specs for both tablets looks pretty impressive, especially for a first effort. Screen resolution is 1920 by 1080, Intel® CORE™ i-7 processor, 2048 levels pen pressure, 256 or 512 GB solid state drive, 16.7 million color display, 8 gig of RAM… I hope that Wacom is successful with this, because competition is a good thing, and hopefully it means Apple, and stylus manufacturers will step up their game resulting in better products for everyone.
There is no word on pricing and or availability as of yet, but you can sign up for email announcements about the tablets as they get closer to a launch date and release pricing info.
While parts of this video might seem like an impractical way to experience a shopping experience, I guarantee you this is in your near future. As smart phones, tablets, interactive signage, and devices like Microsoft’s Surface and Kinect become more ubiquitous, this kind of experience will be more common. The example below centers around shopping for clothes, and actually eliminates trying things on. I doubt that step will ever go away, but this kind of digital interaction combined with real world experiences is coming.
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