News: Grasp the future of touch-screen gaming

Alternative controllers aren't new to the gaming world, over the past months we’ve seen the PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect debuting their take on motion based controller systems.

A new touch-screen controller interface, dubbed Surface, appeared recently, capable of playing PC titles in a most unique way.

Surface is an experimental touch-screen platform from Microsoft. A selected number of controls are displayed on-screen via the DREAM (Dynamically Resizing Ergonomic and Multi-touch) interface, with users simply having to touch the required ‘buttons’ to execute tasks in a game.

The interface automatically re-sizes itself to fit players' hands and can be freely moved around anywhere on the screen.

As reported by Kotaku, a recent demonstration saw Valve's Portal and Microsoft Flight Simulator, two games with notoriously tricky control layouts, being successfully tested on the system.

The platform builds on Mark Micire's DREAM controller and was put together by Eric McCann, a student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell robotics lab.

The controller scheme definitely looks promising at the moment but it remains to be seen if it can compete on equal grounds with more traditional layouts such as the keyboard and mouse or console controller.

The video below contains a demonstration of the interface in action.

Grasp the future of touch-screen gaming

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