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I recently spotted two projects using Kinect that I thought NEXT readers would enjoy. The first project is from Dr. Dave Brown who joined me on stage at last years Worldwide Partner Conference to demo NUIverse on the Samsung SUR40. Now he’s built a framework for rendering holographic videos recorded...

Today, Craig Mundie , senior advisor to CEO Steve Ballmer, and Eric Rudder , chief technical strategy officer, hosted the sixth annual TechForum gathering here at Microsoft’s brand-new Envisioning Center . TechForum is a yearly event that offers a small group of technology writers and thinkers...

Pier Fawkes and his team at PSFK posted their Future of Work report this week and among the themes they highlighted was the use of telepresence to help colleagues interact with each other across the distances. One of the technologies they mentioned was Illumishare , an MSR project that I’ve blogged...

In this final post on NUI I’d like to go beyond Kinect and explain why NUI is much more than touch and gesture. There are several other trends that will help bring these more natural user interfaces. The Internet of Things As more and more devices become connected to the Internet (and thus to...

It seems that Nokia is on a tear across the digital mapping industry. The recent launch of the Nokia 920 was a definite reminder of the company’s experience in creating great devices, and earlier this month the company drove a stake, or two, or three, in the ground of the virtual landscape, as...

It’s been a while since I wrote about Microsoft Tag – but that doesn’t mean I’m not still on the lookout for cool uses of the digital recognition technology. The latest use I found is graphic design project from Meta Menkveld titled “Everything is corn”. it’s...

When I first saw the KinÊtre project from Microsoft Research I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it – a novel use for Kinect yes, but what would it be used for other than some fun? And then I thought about my childhood watching cartoons with inanimate objects, animated to behave like...

I bet you have an IKEA catalog in your house. Given they print 211 million copies per year, it’s a decent bet and now IKEA is seeking to enliven that physical object with some digital goodness. WIRED took a look at this blending of the physical and digital worlds where users will be able to...

This one has been doing the rounds but I couldn’t resist posting here in case you missed it. The V Energy drinks team commissioned this amazing installation that turns motion in to music. You can download the track (MP3) that resulted from this ambitious project and read an incredibly detailed...

While in Toronto this week for WPC, I had the chance to talk with some of our partners about the amazing stuff they’re doing with things such as Windows 8 and the Kinect for Windows SDK . Meanwhile, a group of around 350 students in Sydney were showing off some of the amazing things they’ve...

This year’s ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI, for short) wraps up today in Austin. It sounds like it was another amazing year for the conference. What’s really great about CHI is that it gives you a panorama of how technology and experience design is being...

Add this to the project lists of Kinect enabled applications to blend the physical and digital worlds . The UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences built this for an National Science Foundation funded project on informal science education and were inspired by a project...

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is taking place this week in Austin, Texas. It’s more well known as CHI and is the premier international conference on human-computer interaction. CHI is always a highlight of my tech year as the event attracts a wide discipline of...

Last year we published a short video with me touring the Microsoft Home – shown above – it’s a facility we have on our main campus in Redmond that explores what technology may be commonplace in homes in the next 5-10 years. For that reason it’s not a Jetsons like place and is...

When I first heard the phrase blending of the physical and digital I thought it was another buzzword to add to the bingo card. Digging deeper, I realized there is much more to it than that. I’d been hearing the phrase around Microsoft for a while and during TechForum , an event Craig Mundie...