Microsoft Surface Parody - Milan

Microsoft Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special barcode labels on top of it.

The technology behind Surface is called Multi-touch. It has at least a 25-year history,beginning in 1982, with pioneering work being done at the University of Toronto (multi-touch tablets) and Bell Labs (multi-touch screens). The product idea for Surface was initially conceptualized in 2001 by Steven Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research. In October 2001, a virtual team was formed with Bathiche and Wilson as key members, to bring the idea to the next stage of development.

Surface applications can be written in Windows Presentation Foundation or XNA. The development process is much like normal Vista development, but custom WPF controls had to be created by the Surface team due to the unique interface of Surface. Developers already proficient in WPF have been trained in the idiosyncrasies of writing Surface apps and should be available to customize Surface deployments for the large hotels, casinos, and restaurants at which the machines will first be deployed.

More Informations:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/touch-me/microsoft-surface-confirmed-touch+sensitive-10k-minority-report-table-264338.php

Microsoft's High Capacity Color Barcodes

Microsoft Corp. is getting into the business of bar codes. But these aren't your typical black-and-white stripes.

The company has developed a new type of bar code that uses multiple colors and triangular shapes to store more data per square inch than possible with the traditional approach.





Microsoft says consumers will be able to scan the high-capacity bar codes with Web cams and eventually with mobile-phone cameras. Once the bar code is read, using special software, consumers will be connected to online services that will provide extra information about the product -- such as a DVD rating, soundtrack details or related products.

The capacity of the new bar codes will depend on factors including the number of colors used and the amount of triangles squeezed into the space, Jancke said. Using four colors, at a triangle size that can be read by a good imaging device, the High Capacity Color Barcodes will hold about two times more data than traditional bar codes do. If the High Capacity Color Barcodes are designed to be read by the lower-quality cameras on mobile phones, as with the ISAN system, the capacity will be somewhat less.

More Informations:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/hccb/about.aspx
http://research.microsoft.com/research/hccb/
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/apr07/04-16MSBarCodePR.mspx

View your photos in 3D with Seadragon & Photosynth Technology.

This Software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.






About six months ago, a Microsoft researcher, a PhD student, and a University professor invented a new photo browsing technology called “Photo Tourism”. The technology was so cool that anyone who saw it wanted to be part of the project. Noah Snavely, a student at the University of Washington (UW), had single-handedly coded a rich prototype under the joint supervision of Steve Seitz (also from UW) and Rick Szeliski from Microsoft Research (MSR). The question was: what were we (Microsoft) going to do with such a rich concept?

Seadragon had also developed a photo browsing technology. It was very different from Photo Tourism. Seadragon provided seamless zooming around collections of pictures and efficient multi-resolution streaming transport between clients and servers. Photo Tourism matched pictures, found logical transitions between them, and built a 3 dimensional interraction model. Seadragon and Photo Tourism were a marriage of technologies made in heaven. With rapid prototyping in mind, we entered a mutually beneficial partnership between the University of Washington, Live Labs, and MSR. The symbiosis of Photo Tourism and Seadragon became the Live Labs project called Photosynth.

Install Photosynth: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/installing.htm

View Videos:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs/
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html

Feature Plan: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/whatis/smartphotos.html