Microsoft Research Projects Showcased

prostoalex writes "Seattle Times reporter visited the Microsoft Research expo hosted by the company. The inventions of the future include a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications, a software package that translates the sign language into readable English, e-mailable identification documents and some enhancements to Microsoft's operating systems."

Comments

Microsoft Research or Ripoff?

[webguru4god]

Two of the ideas that Microsoft presented at this expo, both of which are mentioned in the Seattle Times article, are ideas or inventions that have already been invented by other people!

"Robie the Robot" appears to be nothing more than an Evolution ER1 Robotics kit, which Evolution Robotics has been selling for quite a while now. It is a robotics kit that allows you to take an existing laptop and hook it up to some motors and a webcam and control through some command line API's or a nice GUI Evolution has built.

The American Sign Language translation glove was actually introduced at the 2002 Intel Science Talent Search competition by Ryan Patterson of Grand Junction, CO. Patterson's glove uses custom designed electronics to detect hand and finger movements and translate those movements from ASL into their English forms, letters and punctuation.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Microsoft or saying that they are ripping off other people's ideas, but if they are trying to bill these items as new research developed at MS R&D labs that's wrong. If they are merely taking these ideas and refining them for future use in the consumer/professional world, then I'm sure that these concepts will benefit from having Microsoft's resources. I'm merely trying to point out that these ideas aren't new in any way, and they have already been conceived and engineered by others, who should recieve all due credit.

Re:Wow! I Am So Shocked!

[josh crawley]

You've been able to do that ever since Win NT4, maybe even 3.51. Here ya go. Another great innovation, only from Microsoft.

Amazing innovation!

[LauraW]

Some Microsoft researchers showed off technologies they hope to include in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Those included a rebuilt task bar that could sort onscreen files, and a program that acted like a magnifying glass for Web sites. A program called Fabric would allow a user to drag windows to the side of the computer screen, where they would turn into small icons.

Wow! Nobody's ever done that that before!

Re:How to make money in the future? not!

[0x0d0a]

Not making the stockholders money?

No, that's not true. It's an investment in a patent portfolio, which is an enormously powerful weapon for an established company.

I do know a couple people from CMU that did work at MS Research, and it's considered sort of where you go when either you're done doing serious work and want to dick around and draw pay. Lots of old CMU profs headed on up there after they've established themselves.