Microsoft Research makes a ton of free stuff available to download - here are some of my favorites to keep you busy during the lean period up to the New Year!
Did you get a Kinect for Christmas? Okay, the games a great and I challenge you to beat my 51 goals on Kinect Sports soccer in target practice mode - but you really ought to check out Video Kinect. Tucked away in the Kinect dashboard is the gateway to armchair video conversations with your family. Mince pies not included.
Part 3 in the series of tours around places in Microsoft Research takes us to the prototyping shop. Our researchers often want to build gadgets and widgets to test out their ideas and instead of farming out the work and waiting days for results, they can wander down to the ground floor of Building 99 and have their ideas tooled up on lathes, 3D printers and all manner of other equipment that would put my school woodworking shop to shame.
It sounds like heresy but with the holiday season upon us, is it time to rethink your relationship with technology? Is technology making us more or less human? A post by Nick Bilton of the New York Times got me thinking....
Word Lens feels like magic and it's a good example of where the future could take us when we combine location, context, machine translation and a bunch of other tech. Right now, we're just at the beginning of something that could lead to an augmented reality world - built by us.
Heirlooms are usually things like jewelry or family treasures but Richard Banks of Microsoft Research in Cambridge is exploring how technology can act as heirlooms. Should we be capturing our fleeting moments to hand down to our families or even historians? That's what Richard and a team in Cambridge are exploring.