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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.
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.
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.
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
It's called the "Jump-To-Conclusion Mat".
http://www.goats.com/archive/081127.html
More music, fewer hits
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!!
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
For proprietary, trade-secret reasons, MS needed to develop a workforce that doesn't need chairs. Microsoft spokeswoman C. DeFenestra refused comment.