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Microsoft Shows Off Future Product Tech
adeelarshad82 writes "Microsoft opened a portion of its fifth TechFair to Silicon Valley residents, demonstrating more than 15 technologies, which included everything from real-time translation to mobile-to-mobile networking to improved image stitching. The top two that really stood out were the translating telephone, which actually used no 'telephone' at all — it was a test to discover how well Microsoft's speech algorithms could interpret speech, translate it, and then speak the translation using text-to-speech algorithms — and Manual Deskterity, a new paradigm for a user interface; a right-handed user's left hand, for example, can be used for coarse manipulations of objects, while the right can be used for fine manipulation, such as with a pen. It sounds a bit simplistic, at least at this stage. Since one of the charters of Microsoft Research is that the work should eventually be moved to product teams, there's a good chance that the prototypes will eventually be made available to the public at large."
Two words: Courier Tablet
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
One of the technologies showcased looked a little bit interesting. It was a "pseudo-3D". Here's from TFA:
"Akeley's prototype uses depth filtering, layering different focal planes on top of one another to give the eye something to focus upon as a 3d object moves "closer" and "farther" from the eye."
Could it mean 3D without funny glasses? I have no idea, but I hope so.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Can you figure out which one?
I'm going to guess Innovative because it's the only one that starts with a vowel? Or maybe Revolutionary because it uses all the vowels (even the sometimes vowel)?
No, Slashdot is just fucked. Not even Google Chrome (faster than a speeding french fry!) can save it now.
Only those of us who can figure out how to get around their ajax crap stand a chance.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
i have most of it disabled (classical comments view and all). Still some areas that revert to 2.x style tho.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I for one welcome us, the new overlords :)
which is totally what she said
Quite a few actually. See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
This might not be far-fetched at all. I identified decades ago, before I was even legally an adult, that I had precisely that division of labor between my two hands and arms, and indeed probably between both entire halves of my body and brain: one half performed brute force maneuvers requiring strength, while the other specialized in performing actions requiring precision. Thus I write and manipulate a spoon with one hand, while using the other to throw a ball, swing a bat, and wield a steak knife. To some degree I've tried to thwart this as an adult, by trying to "teach" each hemisphere to be less specialized, but I still throw like a girl with that other hand.
Revolutionary.
Microsoft research does good work. Some of the ideas that come out of there are definitely cool and creative, like surface. Others are new and innovative, like the tablet. What Microsoft can't seem to do is to move ideas from research into products. There's a big institutional roadblock that prevents them from pushing new, innovative, creative, and cool ideas out the door. The result: no revolution.
And yeah, I think it will kill them in the long run if they can't fix that problem.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Singularity was an interesting project. I only wish that they would have shepherded it along until it was closer to a commercial product.
Browsing through there I found one - Destination Maps.
Only it doesn't show up at all in Safari using Bing Maps. Have they really delivered it? I cannot say.
They have a ton of talk about the amazing integration of Microsoft R&D in products, but again very little I see as shipping things or core features - even Destination Maps is more of an adornment than a core feature, and one I doubt more than a handful of people use day to day.
The crime of it all is they do have brilliant people there, but they up doing the world very little good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Market testing.... That's what MS does with new ideas... but it doesn't mean they will produce.
Can't they just hire someone from Bell Labs who has actually turned an idea into an awesome product the entire world relies on?
Where is the flaw? Do they think they're the Yankees and can just throw more money at it? Maybe they need to start thinking along the lines of the A's and try instead to build intelligently and within their means.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The sad fact is Yankees win world series and Billy Beane's A's never do. Microsoft _is_ the Yankees (or modern-day Chelsea for our UK brethren) of technology. Lotta money and they keep winning, even if people don't like it.
Yes there have been teams on the cheap that pop up and win every so often. But when it's an open-market free-for-all (no salary caps or revenue sharing) like MLB or the English Premier League, the teams with the money win the leagues.
So Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and HP (and now Google?) will keep winning - that's what money does for you. Not romantic, kinda sucks, and makes us all a little happy when one of the big boys fail and the upstart gets a moment in the sun.
But that doesn't mean you can't be a twins fan / scunthorpe united supporter / linux nerd. Just recognize that you're in the minority and so what? Who gives a rip? Be happy.
I created this account just so I could comment on this story
I wish I could be more impressed by that.. but I'm not. It's already trivial to...
1. take a video source
2. split up into images
3. from those images, sort by quality (least blur to most blur)
4. map them onto the panoramic plane (thanks to it being video, you can use motion vectors to help this process, but it's not really needed.. existing algorithms will chew through them easily enough)
5. remove those images that are superfluous (i.e. not needed for covering the entire canvas)
6. blend (using al algorithm a la smartblend to try to keep the number of decapitated people down)
You can have fun with some movies that way...
Terminator 4: http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/1629/moviepanosterminator4.jpg
The Mist (may be considered a spoiler, for those who haven't seen it yet): http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/3221/moviepanosthemist.jpg
The article notes that the panorama of one of the microsoft buildings is 'crisp'.. well sure, when scaled down a good fraction of the original video's size in terms of coverage. Now if they combined multiple frames for a superresolution image (similar to how astronomers might image stack a bunch of blurry shots and out comes a high-resolution detailed image) and thus panorama, that'd be more fun.
"Manual Deskterity" (did not see this term referenced in the slideshow by the way - where did it come from?) sounds like something they developed just so they could patent it. This seems like the natural progression for something like the Wiimote or possibly even an iPad-like device, considering it's what people do naturally anyway.
Funny thing I noticed flipping through the slideshow: many of the annoying pop-up mouseover ads open a bing window (including the word "Apple"). Of course there are also Google ads unobtrusively placed under the main content of the page. If only Microsoft had some people around who could research ways of making their ads less annoying...
Microsoft, it has nothing to do with those other words. :)
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
I don't know ... Microsoft Surface and Project Natal were both pieces of cool research that have moved into products. MS are aware that it's been hard to transition technology between Microsoft Research and the product teams, but it is an issue they are working on, and seem to be getting better at.
After reading the article and going through the pictures I was quite surprised how mundane a lot of the technologies are. The tablet table or whatever it's called has been showcased by Microsoft for years but they've yet to produce a competitor OS to the iPhone or Andriod. I noticed an ad for the Kin next to the article Another big ticket item seemed to be the photo stitching for images - which reminds me of the software that my Canon camera came with 5 years ago. This might work better but it is five years on and I'm sure Canon has improved on this as well.
Microsoft opened a portion of its fifth TechFair to Silicon Valley residents, demonstrating more than 15 technologies...
Good god, I thought schools taught people to count up to one hundred AT LEAST.
I know that some of MS Research stuff is really good. I've been to some academic presentations from people working there.
I find current MS status exactly as how Xerox was when Apple and MS begun. PARC labs where doing a lot of really good stuff but the management failed to transform it to real useful products. It will be other small companies who will come to do it... that in theory, of course patents will ultimately block such kind of innovation. yay!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Or you can just plug a second mouse in. People freak out when they see it ("that can't work!") but it does. Just pick two mice with a different number of "mickeys" resolution.
It would be nice to see a real article about the more interesting sounding things but as it is, I'm not impressed.
Check out this page, Paul Haeberli's wonderful old site Grafica Obscura from when he was at SGI.
http://www.graficaobscura.com/merge/index.html
This is his famous image merging by projective warp program, where he could take a bunch of snapshots and automatically warp and stitch them together. I think this is from 1995 or so. It references papers from 1991 and this one from 1994: S. Mann and R. W. Picard. Virtual Bellows: Constructing High Quality Stills from Video. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Mov, 1994.
Many researchers have published about extracting features from blurry views. I remember one ACM Siggraph article I believe from years back about using multiple beams to achieve high resolution images underwater for example.
The deskterity and pseudo-3d sound interesting but honestly there is very little to see in this article.
A few months back, we were seeing comparisons between five Microsoft mice prototypes against the then-new Apple Magic Mouse (the mouse with a build in touch surface). What everyone recognized then and seems to recognize now is that there's a big difference between an actual shipping product and prototypes that may be cost prohibitive, cumbersome, or otherwise unacceptable to consumers due to the numerous details that need to be worked out in the process of going from prototype to product. Microsoft is quickly becoming one of the biggest makers of vaporware in the market, and they need to stop it before they lose (even more) credibility.
amen. how do I turn off these fucking comments already. firefox grinds to a halt every time I open a story from google reader.
Microsoft Surface is revolutionary? Have a lol.