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

[GMonkeyLouie]

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.

Robotic Receptionist? Old News...

[HockeyPuck]

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..)

Re:History

[yttrstein]

I was involved with the development and testing of "blackbird" a million years ago by microsoft, which would have owned them pretty much the entire internet in the late 90's had they decided to go through with it.

But they didn't. Biggest reason? They didn't like that everyone that wanted to develop for it used Macs. There was an enormous Ballmer shaped problem with porting the SDK to Mac OS. So instead of just not doing that and releasing it anyhow, they canned the entire idea, amputating half the department that came up with it.

And that's microsoft.

Re:Eagle 1

[iluvcapra]

This invention [perceptivepixel.com] has already been invented and is marketed to the government, military and other clients. Perceptive Pixel also developed the interactive map John King would use to show election results; didn't you see the Daily Show [huffingtonpost.com]? :)

Photosynth rocks!!!!

[gsgriffin]

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!!!

Re:uh oh

[nschubach]

Not something wrong, but it makes you wonder...

Why now do we see Microsoft trying harder than before?

Slower sales? Pitching the company instead of a product? Trying to recover from the slump in stock sales? Trying to recover from years of a bad image before it hits them hard?

Why does Microsoft view the brand as declining value?