MS Surface mobile phone interaction

Question

Hi, looking at some of the MS Surface demos they use a HTC mobile phone running windows to interact with the surface (access the phones memory and download the images from it and display using the scatter view).

My question is how were they communicating with the phone?

would it have been using bluetooth or wireless connection?

Is it a case of detecting which type of phone and using its API to communicate?

Has anyone done much of this yet and got any pointers.

Currently searching for the HTC API or maybe its a case of windows mobile communicating wirelessly.

Makes me wonder how hard it will be to integrate with other types of phone not running Windows?

Time to get busy reading.

J

Answer 1

For the phone demos, Microsoft used 'tags' (which is sort of like a barcode) on the bottom of the phones in order to identify each individual unit and then connect to them via bluetooth/wifi.

For more information on tags: Tags and Object Recognition with Microsoft Surface – Part 1

Answer 2

There is a demo called mobile connect. You install a client app n the windows smartphone and you interact with the surface using bluetooth. This is enabed only with the phone in a certain area on the table.

1) They wrote a client program to push / pull the data 2) Bluetooth 3) Phones supporting the client. So far I know only windows phone compatible with the demo

Other phones? This is a questoin of the bluetooth stack on both sides and how you want to communicate. The on phone app makes it easier by far, but that approach is only possible in a non public area. Who would install a software on his phone without fully trusting the producer?

Mobile Connect