Thursday night, I sat watching the Windows 10 event, and I have to say, they blew everyone away…

Surface Studio

Let’s start with the biggest announcement, the surface studio. This product is purely beautiful and should be every creator’s dream. The zero-gravity hinge, which enables you to angle the screen where you want with just the press of a single finger means you can get the correct angle anytime. When you push it all the way down, you can lean against it and put quite a bit of your body weight onto the screen.

It’s a 4.5k screen and looks incredibly beautiful and detailed, and you even have the option of changing colour profile so you can get the most accurate range of colours. I would never need a computer like this, but damn would I want one anyway which goes to show how sought after this device is going to be.

Surface Book

The surface book has a huge overhaul with a better-dedicated GPU with 2GB of dedicated GPU RAM which is built for gamers. However, they didn’t quite go into detail on how well it will perform for most modern gamers. This is something I kind of wish they went into more detail about.

However, it just looks insane, and I think it could make a lot of people happy, especially if they were on the lookout for an upgraded SKU. They have managed to push a lot more inside, yet the form factor is still pretty much unchanged, which is spectacular.

VR AND AR Devices

Last year we saw the Hololens, a great augmented reality device which really pulled all the punches. Virtual objects scattered across your room look really fun. This year, they showed it in even more detail alongside the new Paint3D (more on this soon).

They showed that you could view an online community of 3D created models which you can pull into reality and place wherever you like, they also showed a proof of concept where you can go shopping in Edge and pull out the products into reality and check if it works within your room.

This is truly the future and is something we will all be keeping a close eye on. They then showed their new VR headsets starting at $299, which is cheaper than what’s currently out now. You could picture yourself in other countries without even having to travel, and this means you could easily plan your holiday before even flying over.

Windows 10 Creative Update

Now for the actual software updates, there has been so much packed into this update, and I believe it’s enough to excite any creative user from 3D paint which allows the user to create any 3D model and even import models scanned from real-life objects.

They showcased a sandcastle on a plinth which was scanned in from the HP x3 and then imported into the Paint application. Then a little holiday memento was created including a little 3D emoji with sunglasses. This looked spectacular; they then took this 3D object and placed it into real-life using the hololens.

New broadcasting options are using Microsoft’s newly purchased Beam, which will be competing against Twitch. Beam offers zero-latency streaming between the broadcaster and the viewers, which seems like a great win. I have noticed that Twitch can have a good couple of seconds latency between the broadcast and users.

There are even rumours that the Paint3D app will be UWP. Which means it will work with Windows mobile, but we will have to wait and see how this actually works.

Full video of the event