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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.
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...
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.
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.