The tiles feature found on Windows Phone and the Windows operating system are pretty useful as they help provide the user with information at a glance, but wouldn’t it be a great idea if users could somehow find a way to interact with it even further? This would undoubtedly help increase the feature’s functionality, and apparently that is what Microsoft is experimenting on at the moment.
A series of video clips were originally uploaded by Microsoft Research but were soon taken down. There was even a link to the “Interactive Tile” project on Microsoft’s website that has since been removed, although thankfully there were some out there, who were quick enough to nab the videos and have since re-uploaded them for our viewing pleasure.
The videos basically shows Microsoft research, Jiawei Gu, showing off how the Interactive Live Tiles are supposed to work. One of the examples was how users could drill down inside of a Live Tile to gain additional information within that app without having to launch the app in its entirely. Gu describes this feature as “parallel tasking” and shows off the feature running on a traditional PC with a monitor.
According to the project’s description, “This project features an Interactive-Tile UI system that enables users to access and manipulate Live Tiles in an interactive way with touch gestures. Interactive Tile’s UI is responsive and flexible to an app’s content and function. Users can provide quick input to the Interactive Tile on the Start screen. With a perception of Start as an entrance page, Interactive Tiles were introduced to empower the start screen with an intermediate access level to applications.”
However there’s no telling if Microsoft will actually implement this feature as it is one of Microsoft Research’s projects, but it sounds like a pretty cool feature and we’re sure many Windows 8 users would love to see it being implemented in future updates or future versions of Windows. In the meantime what do you guys think? Is this a feature you’d love to see part of the Metro UI?