UMass Student Turns Microsoft Surface Into Multi-Unit Control Map

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At first glance, what you’re looking at below looks like a video game on steroids, but what it actually is is a delicate combination of a Microsoft program coupled with robotics and a Ph.D. candidate’s inventiveness. It’s Microsoft Surface, and it’s controlling robots.

I know, that last sentence got some people off their chairs, but the story goes something like this: basically, Mark Micire, a Ph.D. candidate out of UMass Lowell, put together a system by which Microsoft Surface could control robots via remote. It takes existing systems, existing hardware, and creates what amounts to a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup technology in which chocolate programming couples with peanut butter robots (as Dave Barry once said, I am a trained professional writer–do NOT try these metaphors at home) to create something new and exciting.

The second stage of this test even went so far as to control a robot around a maze, both on Microsoft Surface and in a corresponding maze in real-time.

The implication here are staggering–actual war fought like a round of Starcraft II, restaurants with robotic waitstaff that bring food and drink ordered from a tabletop, and so on. When will us regular folk see this in wide use? No clue as yet, but this is likely where such things will begin.