Microsoft Student Partners

As some of you may already have seen Microsoft Office Labs has released a 5 minute video of what they dream the year 2019 should be. I have to say that the video is very impressive with Hollywood level production values and some interesting concepts.

While it must be a nice job to be paid to dream and then spending a lot of money on putting that dream into an awesome video I feel that videos like this are important to show possible directions technology can or should take, to act as a goal to strive for, a beacon placed in the future to guide us.

While I do love the future they envision here, not everything will be so uniform as I do like my dark themes and others like red, blue or fluorescent pink styles, some like curvy designs while others like leather coated sharp designs with brushed aluminium.

For all this to happen screens will need to be developed that are incredibly cheap, flexible, low power (or wireless power) and sensor laden and tiny or remote computers with powerful graphics processing will need to be tied to them then every product will have to be coated with these screen, oh we will also need decent internet (and at this rate that isn’t likely to happen by 2019 unless people start picking up their act) and interfaces will have to become a lot easier to create (Microsoft is doing a good job working on this at this moment). Apparently in the future we will also either have people hired full time to clean fingerprints or we will remove the ability produce oil removed from the skin on our hands, even better though would be to have this magic surface absorb fingerprints for the purposes of power generation/scratch repair/some other awesome and magic purpose.

This is all doable by some point in the future but 2019 seems way too soon, I am wondering if they chose such a difficult goal so that we shall try and pursue it, and even if we only get half way to this goal we have still covered a lot of ground. Then again in 10 years we went from 1.44mb 3.5″ floppy disks to 16gb in the size of your pinky nail. we went from some people having analogue mobiles with 2 colour screens to everyone having full colour graphical phones with calendars, games, web browsing and media playback being standard so who knows where we will be in another 10 years.

below is the HD version of the full length video.

Another very cool development from another Microsoft incubator division is a program called Touchless.

Touchless allows you to create Multi-Touch applications, simply by using your webcam to detect movement.

The Touchless SDK team have also got a demo to download to show this off.

I’d love to see a whole bunch of Touchless apps coming from Australia students.

Luke
UWA MSP

http://twitter.com/ekulmi

Direct to you (and the world) comes Microsoft Research’s (MSR) latest project gone wild – WorldWide Telescope. The program takes utilises other MSR projects such as PhotoZoom and PhotoSynth to create an interactive 3D view of space as we know it, overlayed with images from all your favourite telescopes.

WorldWide Telescope - Splash Screen

The project includes imagery from Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and others and claims to provide you with the same quality of imagery that NASA scientists use.

WWT will show you all of the objects in your current viewport (along the bottom), selecting any of these will zoom in and display information about the object.

Not to be restricted just to space, It’s easy enough to tell WWT that you are sick of looking at the sky and that you’d rather look at panoramas of alien planets, bringing up Mars as seen by Oppurtunity and Spirit:

Is that my shoe?

Hot off the press – Group Shot is a nifty little toy from Microsoft Research that solves the group shot problem. Have you ever taken multiple photos of a group of people, only to be thwarted time and time again by different people closing their eyes?

Group Shot solves this by allowing you to select the “good parts” (i.e. all those open eyes) of all the images and then joining everything together into one final shot. You can use this to make sure that everyone in that family shot is looking at the camera, and that those unwanted photobombers are history!

Check out the example (and tutorial) or go straight to Group Shot for a download.

It’s exam period as well, so Good Luck to all, and stay tuned for exciting happenings coming to a University near you!