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Look What's Cooking At Microsoft Labs
stinkymountain writes "Writer John Brandon spent two days at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond and got an inside look at some pretty
interesting projects under development, including a robotic receptionist, a new type of touch screen for people with fat fingers, and an electronic table that allows multiple people to collaborate in real time. Brandon also talks about some of these research projects on this NPR podcast."
Eagle 1 looks quite awesome, think how great that would be for disaster control if you could see a real-time map of where the flood waters are rising fastest, where the fires are spreading from, or whatever the current disaster of the day might be. Making it interactive/collaborative sounds great, so you could draw little plans of attack and have them distributed to everyone in your organization.
I've never been a real Microsoft groupie but this sounds very civic-minded, innovative, and useful.
In other news, I would love to have a similar product for city-wide games of paintball or capture the flag.
I like the one of Big Ben, the others seems uses of a big touch screen or/and boring.
-Woof woof woof!
MS Labs have a long history of hit-or-miss projects. Some are great, most are not and get killed off sometime during product development. Let's hope some of them get to see a release date!!
for those that don't want to click every 4 sentences.
Microsoft Surface for a coffee table; surface for a card table; surface for a wall; surface for a small tablet; oh, and something called "visual Studio" -- that one probably won't catch on.
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Does the electronic table come with an autoeject for the chairs around it?
At the Cisco campus that I recently visited in SanJose, if you visit one of the less visited buildings (like one occupied by Engineers as opposed to the Briefing Center building), instead of a receptionist sitting at the desk, at the desk is a box the size of a microwave and a 40in HDTV on the wall. You push a button on the 'box' and it calls a centralized receptionist, who then appears on the TV (this might be the same tech as their Telepresence product). Anyhow, if you need a guest badge, she records your information and a guest badge is dispensed from the box on the desk.
I'm assuming that the remote receptionist can do all the other tasks as well (calling someone down etc..)
If they get a patent on using a touchscreen with fat, cheetos-covered fingers, linux is doomed!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
start your chair jokes.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Change "advertising" in this to "research budget" and it's apropos. :P
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
That's what she said!
No, but actually, that was useful, and thank you.
The robotic receptionist - which will be used at Microsoft headquarters, likely next year - will help Microsoft visitors find shuttles to get around campus. The receptionist can even identify visitors based on what they are wearing and provide information on shuttle routes using GPS tracking data.
Robotic voice:
- You're wearing a ...yellow ... Linux ... T-shirt. You have a ... Hattori Hanzo ... sword. You must be here to... kill... Bill. Please take the next shuttle on your right.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
IMHO - and I'm no longer in an MS shop - is that OSLO and VS2010 both add up to HuYOOGE code bloat if prior MS tools are any indication. What MS needs to do, since they're obviously trying to automagic stuff more and more, is to sort out including their whole freaking library in the binaries by default.
So one of the proposals is an electronic robot receptionist...
Robot: Welcome to Microsoft
Visitor: I'd like to talk to a human.
Robot: I'm sorry, you're request did not compute, please [BSOD replaces face render].
Take Nobody's Word For It.
s/Bload/Bloat... damnit shoulda previewed!
got an inside look at some pretty interesting projects under development, including a robotic receptionist
The REAL interesting part is that they're working on the next series of ads with Jerry Seinfeld!
The plot is this:
The Mac Guy, being smug, steps on Jerry's hand after Jerry has tripped on the sidewalk. The PC guy helps Jerry up. Jerry says "Thanks! I'm a PC too!"
Then they chase after Mac Guy, who is super-fast and runs far into the distance.
PC then makes a phone call using his Windows hand-held, and orders a bunch of advertising executives to hit Mac "head-on".
Then a "Head-On" parody commercial starts.
After that, the ad executives leave Mac bloody on the sidewalk. They immediately decide to create an "electronic table", and get into their MS-powered GM car, which fails to start and ultimately gets hit by a tandem truck.
Then hot iPhone girl finds Mac, brushes him off, and have a three-some with iPod chick.
Later, Seinfeld meets PC guy, and they are all smug regarding how they destroyed Mac guy.
Jerry goes home, fires up his Mac, and calls his parents on his iPhone.
I especially enjoyed the video of Dr. Bunson Honeydew's research. I felt a bit sorry for his research assistant, though - that poor guy gets all the scut jobs.
#DeleteChrome
gaah! is it just me or did I mentally change "developing" into "smothering with patents"...?
well I guess its fair that if they want to pay for developing nice toys then they should get some payback, though I really wonder how much you can patent on touch sensitive surfaces? I would imagine you could be limited to copyright on your interface, right / wrong?
I was amused to see a touch sensitive interface in the new James Bond film. I was looking for a logo to see if they were advertising anybody on that one...
It's called the "Jump-To-Conclusion Mat".
Touch screens should just provide feedback that says "The fingers you are using on this touch screen are too fat. Please mash your palm on the touch screen to obtain a special touch wand."
Hurray for old news: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/317737_msftdevice30.html
At least Apple employees get to drink Electric Kool-Aid
"But this one goes to 11!"
"...including a robotic receptionist, a new type of touch screen for people with fat fingers" Hey! I saw they used that on the Axiom in Wall-E .
http://www.goats.com/archive/081127.html
More music, fewer hits
While I was in college I once spent the summer installing computers at a small company. After a few installations I received a few calls from people having trouble with their mouse. I soon discovered that these people had one thing in common, red mousepads.
Sure this new blue mouse will work on a variety of surfaces, but will it work on my blue mousepad?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Looks like something that we see in spy movies where a Command Center has access to all the topographical maps and information that it needs in an instant but for disaster recovery and planning. Looks promising. Like all collaborative efforts, success will depend on how well the individual components work well together (databases, etc). Big ass collaboration
Kiosk technology. Not really intended for home users. At $12,500 each (with discounts), I see this more as a novelty more than practical. Big ass table
I'm not exactly sure what this is. It appears to be the software that Surface runs so I don't think it counts as a separate project. Software for big ass table.
An interactive semi-transparent monitor ala Minority Report. The main difference was the interaction in Minority report was with holograms and this is a hard surface. Big ass touchscreen wall monitor.
News aggregator that is focused more on relationships and content than search terms. Might be useful for data mining. Big ass aggregator
Extends touch surfaces on mobile by allowing users to reach behind the screen so that your fat fingers don't block what you are trying to select. This however doesn't solve the compromise of portability of mobile devices with the need for larger screens. Touch surface for your big ass fingers.
Extends software development from sharing code to data models as well. Big ass application development modeling
Well this uses OSLO and is the next version of Visual Studio so putting it into its own project is a bit of a stretch. Big ass IDE.
New MS mice will allow to be used on rougher surfaces like tile and wood than before by increasing the sampling rate of the laser among other advances . New laser mice with big ass oversampling
I think this is software but a virtual receptionist that can interact with and track visitors. Big ass big brother.
Did I miss any big asses?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
- A windows user and satisfied with it
- A .net developer who think .net is a great platform
- An user who thinks that the ribbon are is a great innovation
etc...
But hey, there is no need to apologize. Don't be part of that stupid trend.
"This sounds very civic-minded, innovative, and useful." - There, I fixed that for ya.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Bingo!! If this is all they've got then they are up the creek. Even the Eagle thing is a big yawn as I am sure I've seen something somewhat similar in a GIS or remote-sensing magazine. (Ooh, ooh, but they merge data! Big wow!!)
LMAO I love the mashthekeypad tag that's hilarious!
I'm surprised you didn't try the "they're cooking up FUD" joke...
Mm, this fud tastes good!
I don't care about MS or what people have against whatever.
Photosynth is amazing!!!
I had some old photos taken of a climbing wall with my kids on different places at different times and from different angles. I uploaded all the photos and BAM!! It stitched them all together and gave us a realtime multi-perspective look at it. Whatever gripes you have about MS, give them credit when they are working on something that it really cool!!!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
You:
-Im here to visit my dear mom who works here
Robotic voice: ... dear aunt ... lets set ... so double ... the killer ... delete ... select all
-You are here to
electronic table that allows multiple people to collaborate in real time
I saw this in Iron Man. Hasbro owns the rights.
Anyone concider windex may be in cahoots with microsoft here? I looked at the first like 5 projects and atleast 3 of those were all touchscreen related. Must we make everything all touchscreen now? Please tell me I'm not the only one sick of seeing a touchscreen by now. I don't see the big deal about it besides creating blurry/greasy screens everywhere for people to view. Thats a great idea, lets setup a touchscreen table for socializing!! It can play games and bring up conversation topics, and we can spill beer and food all over it, and it still works! It's a great idea! ...now who wants to work the sticky touchscreen next round of games?
For proprietary, trade-secret reasons, MS needed to develop a workforce that doesn't need chairs. Microsoft spokeswoman C. DeFenestra refused comment.
Nothing to see there. RTFA if you want to be certain of that.
I especially hate robotic receptionist. As if having to speak to voice recognition thing over the phone is not annoying enough.
It is truly sad when they have to make a touch screen for people with fat fingers... "Microsoft: where being is fat is encouraged"
All the data is shown in a real-time interactive map using Virtual Earth, but the key is how Eagle 1 pulls data from many different sources (such as from both Oracle and SAP databases)
Nobody thought of MS-SQL I guess. Or maybe they did.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
"The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now."
That's okay, bloat makes sense. I'm still trying to find a definition for "HuYOOGE" though.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I hope this is designed to resist cheese puff stains.
It would be interesting to see if any of these new projects will be implemented in a health care / hospital environment. A Lucidtouch x-ray display anyone?
Oh but every day I hear Microsoft doesn't invent anything...
I have an idea. Instead of trying to figure out 40 different (fairly ordinary) ways to use a touchscreen, try to focus a little of that brain power on your bread and butter. You can't afford another Vista.
A quick web search found this: http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/spring96/0113.html
Probably little chance of success, since it would not be interoperable with established tools (primitive though they weree) and more importantly, wouldn't be "hackable" by random geniuses who created all the web applications that succeeded as well as failed. With all useful applications in the HTMP/CGI domain, a proprietary project wouldn't have had a chance.
Except for Microsoft's tradition of making a large number of pale imitations of successful products after the fact, most of which fail. True, a few succeed enough to gain traction and are wildly successful (Office, Visual Studio, XBox) enough to support all the other me-too development, but when you are fighting network effects, even a very good execution is useless (Zune vs. iPod). Web development has happened faster than any single entity could keep up with (in the same way that microcomputer development far exceeded even giant IBM's ability to make comparable mainframe applications when PCs hit the world).
Thanks, i closed the tab upon reading the phrase "pre-pre-alpha".
alpha is developing code
pre-alpha is proof of concept?
pre-pre-alpha is an idea on a whiteboard?
From your summary it seams there is nothing of interest.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!