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

Politics as usual?

[Anonymous Coward]

a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf

I thought we had prior art on this one - in the form of the US Senate.

Re:Politics as usual?

[DigiShaman]

Ohh, that's so cold. But hey, nobody ever said you had to like the truth.

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.

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!

WTF? Bowls?

[joelt49]

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.
(Emphasis added)

I think the title says it all. I mean, BOWLS? Who the hell is on crack at MS (besides the MS Software Security and Ethics divisions, if they even exist)? Excuse me, but why would looking at a picture of keys make a parent feel more comfortable? Me, I'd prefer see the actual child. This is one invention destined to fail.

end of convention as we know it?

[fermion]

Was it in Back to School where, during the movie they had a progrsion of students leaving tape recorders in their seat instead of attending of class, and by then end even the proffesor was replaced by a tape recorder?

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.

MS stability not that far from Linux stability

[0x0d0a]

MS stability isn't all that far from Linux stability. I'd pretty safe-feeling with both the NT kernel and the Linux kernel. GNOME software and Explorer -- *application software* both have instabilities.

Granted, so much crap is tied into Explorer that Explorer dying is generally worse than the GNOME panel crashing, but if you compare each chunk to its Linux equivalent, it's not *that* far away.

If MS hadn't made a couple of totally stupid moves, tying functionality into Explorer instead of doing it the right way, in the kernel, Explorer crashing away wouldn't be such a big deal (Explorer simulates symlinks, Explorer works around stupid MS file-locking semantics in XP, Explorer provides the high-level widgets for many other applications...)

Re:MS stability not that far from Linux stability

[Tim C]

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.

Re:MS style innovation....

[josh crawley]

What you say is true - but only in theory - as it requires user intervention to support it. Do you really think your average secretary is going to bother pre-ordering each lift he wants to take?

Umm, you pre-order the elevator already, when you press the button in the waiting area. The only problem is that you're only telling the micro-processor that controls it "up or down". If I'm on the 5th, and going to the 10th, and there's an elevator on the 4th floor which already has 5 people in it who are going to the 10th, and 2 others for the 15th, it would make sense for that elevator to stop, rather than another elevator at the 4th which has 3 people destined for the 11th and 12th. Right now your average elevator just says "people who want to go up should get on elevators that are already going up, and vice versa". Now, we could have the same capability by just having the floor number buttons in the elevator waiting atrium, but the cell-phone capability has two potentials:

1. Since cell phones are nigh-ubiquitous, it replaces any unwieldy "50 buttons" interface needing to be in place in the building, and if adopted across the board, becomes an intuitive act for the user (i'm walking toward the elevator, pull out my cellphone...*beep* bam there's my elevator)
2. The location of the cellphone could be tracked within the elevator; therefore the scheduling doesn't get confused by someone getting off before their floor, or some prankster dialing up 50 random floors in a row

Re:Don't read the article!!! [don't worry]

[CurlyG]

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!