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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."
As pointed out in this post, Microsoft Research's work is primarly designed to maintain oligopolies.
You know how much new tech from Microsoft Research has reached and benefited consumers? Damn little.
I'm remember the Truetype fiasco...
May we never see th
With PARC being a shell of its former self, and other corporate R&D facilites either closed or radically cut back, who else out there is really playing with technologies and trying out new ideas?
While many of the ideas and products mentioned in the article seem silly or useless, its this kind of thinking that leads to inovative products down the road.
Apart from the university setting, who else is out there?
And here I thought that Microsoft Research was a black hole where great minds go to never be heard from again.
Some of the more unusual projects were developed by students Microsoft invited to participate in the research fair. Students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands presented the idea of parents keeping in touch with grown children through special bowls with digital cameras in them.
A child could come home and put his keys in the bowl, which would take a picture of the keys and send the image to the parents' bowl. Parents could look into their bowls and feel comforted that their child is home safe.
Why not a motion activated web cam to tak stills of your child actually entering the house? Sometimes I think people look to hard for solutions they skip the most obvious ones.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
People waiting to take an elevator could enter their destination floor into a cellphone instead of pushing the elevator button,...
Just what we need, slashdotted elevators.
It seems to me that there would be nothing more useless than a robot attending a conference. Why rent a conference room and fly in a speaker of the audience is going to be inanimate? I think the hotel and covention lobby will make quite sure that such a machine never exists.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Researcher Darko Kirovski is developing a low-cost way for motor-vehicle departments and companies to create identification cards on paper. The system uses compression technology to turn photos into data and encryption techniques to make forgery nearly impossible, Kirovski said.
Someone could receive a driver's license by e-mail and print it out at home, Kirovski said.
While you could add a digital signature so you would know I modified the data, short of equipping every police officer, bouncer, etc with digital readers to validate the signature - every high/college school student in the country would instantly become legal drinking age as they alter the human readable data printed on the license. It looks like someone isn't thinking this through completely.
But maybe that's the plan. After all they need to sell something new...
They turn photos into data?!? How the hell did they manage that? Sheer genius! Thank the gods that we have MS around to keep the world in amazingly inventive, original products.
However their incredibly innovative (sorry, Microvative) robot, Robie, seems strangely familiar!
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
...a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications...
I call this a memebite. Oversimplified to the point of absurdity, and then poorly translated by someone in a hurry. It takes all of 2ms to realize that employing a robot to attend a conference is a deeply absurd idea. Microsoft's products do not reflect the epitome of quality one would wish, but don't allow that fact to cause you to think the people working there are really *that* stupid.
Obviously, Microsoft has some sort of tele-presence research going on. The possible applications for tele-presence are many, and hardly absurd. That this got translated into "attending conferences" is the fault of some boothtending microsurf (probably a sexy female, by coincidence) that has spent a little too much time in "business" class flying between "conferences."
If you haven't actually posted some bit on just how stupid this idea actually is, you almost did. Since I have, I'll have a little fun with it;
This robot is going to take the seat on your flights, or just go as baggage?
What happens after hours in a multi-day conference? Imagine a storage room with a dozen remotely operated robots kicking around...
At what point do the presenters decide that in-person attendance is overkill and we find a room of 200+ people (or other bots...) waiting patiently for the bot to adjust the mic properly?
Will conference promoters all have lobotomies and forget that allowing someone to retransmit their product to "who knows where" is probably not going to contribute much revenue?
Will Larry Ellison's "conference bot" be 8' tall and gold plated?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Explorer crashing generally isn't a big deal in XP (or 2k for that matter). 9 times out of 10 the OS notices and restarts it for you, and on the odd occassion when it doesn't, you can just launch it yourself from Task Manager.
That said, these days, XP crashes on me about as often as Linux does - ie not very often at all. And yes, I am talking about a machine that gets left on 24/7 - I do not switch my work machine off at all.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yup, looks like someone else did it better.
-John Fenley
There's an awful lot of bashing going on here about the quality of the research. Certainly it isn't all great (and some of it is probably re-hashed), but you've got to remember that this is being reported by the Seattle Times, not a research journal. The reporter is not necessarily going to report the research contribution of a particular project... They're going to report what their readers will understand. In my experience, these things are rarely the same.
Well since the article didn't mention anything that sounded like more than a science fair project I went directly to research.microsoft.com. What I found there didn't look much different than it did 2 years ago. In particular I looked at the "Social Computing Group" because I had paid particular attention to that on my last visit. Last thing they published was in 2002, last thing before that was 2001, followed by a series of things in 2000, 1999, back to 1995.
/scripts/people/gogroup.asp, line 14
It looks like there are about half as many people as before, however they had individual web pages before, and most of them looked pretty much abandoned, now there are no personal web pages.
They talk about work they did in the distant past using Comic Chat and V-Chat as well as something called Hutchworld, but all of this was there and past-tense when I checked it more than a year ago.
So in this area of 3D Virtual reality interactions they are basically doing nothing. Their research department is for-show-only. If they are doing any fundamental scientific research, or even true research in algorithm theory I'd like to hear about it.
I don't personally care whether they do research or not, but I hate when they are compared with other companies that actually DO research as though they are in the same category. I'd put them in the same category as Radio Shack maybe.
At least they are using their own products these days, click around the site too much and you get things like this:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified
- a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications - Asimo with a video camera.
- a software package that translates the sign language into readable English - A U-Force with a modified OCS.
- e-mailable identification documents - PGP signatures.
- some enhancements to Microsoft's operating systems - which usually either amounts to further cadging of features in other OSs or further restrictions on what you are allowed to do with your computer
$40 billion and this is the best they can do?Do not touch -Willie
What happens when you've got 50 people waiting in the lobby, four elevators to service them all, they're all going to a different floor and hear a *ding?* Who's elevator is it? Do people want to have to stop and look to see if the elevator door that just opened is going to their floor? Or do they just want to get in and start going up? You're right. It's an interesting idea, but not without some 'human nature' flaws that need to be ironed out first.