Windows 8's coolest app: Fresh Paint

Windows 8 brings a lot of snazzy new features to the PC, but there still aren't many apps -- never mind good apps -- that take advantage of everything Microsoft's new operating system has to offer.
A handful of small gems, though, have emerged from Microsoft's Windows Store store, including one particular standout: Fresh Paint.
On the surface, Fresh Paint is a straightforward finger-painting app that lets users "draw" on the screen with four different brushes and a color palette. Once you start to play around, though, it becomes clear that this is much more than an updated MS Paint. Fresh Paint actually makes your "brushstrokes" appear as though you're painting with oil on a textured canvas.
That level of detail took some serious feats of science and engineering.
Fresh Paint's origins are in Microsoft Research, where five computer scientists worked several years ago on giving PCs the ability to simulate complex brushstrokes. Painting involves a significant amount of physics: just imagine how thousands of bristles, liquid paint and a rough-surfaced canvas interact. The team needed to create complex algorithms to match each touch and gesture on the screen to real-life paint.
The results were stunning, but the research, dubbed "Project Gustav," was one of the many Microsoft Research ventures that sounds cool but has no clear real-world use case. By 2010, the project had run its course. The engineers filed it away in a virtual cabinet and moved onto the next project.