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This is a guest post by Kevin Schofield, General Manager, Microsoft Research One of the more interesting – and sometimes surreal – parts of my job in Microsoft Research (MSR) is when Hollywood comes calling. The constant flow of science fiction movies and TV shows requires them not...

Over the last few days Microsoft has provided glimpses of our vision for the future and where technology could take us — first with the opening of the Envisioning Center , and then yesterday with a conversation hosted by Craig Mundie and Eric Rudder regarding Microsoft’s strategic and technical...

A pretty cool video of how a Tokyo retailer used Kinect to create a whole new kind of interactive window display, and added a little competition to the shopping experience.

The guys over at RazorFish have been busy in their lab, improving upon the 5D shopping experience that they unleashed at last year’s NRF EXPO. Judging from the video, it seems they’ve pulled out all the stops. Razorfish 5D uses Kinect for Windows and the Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft Pixelsense...

This is a guest post by Kim Stocks, Director of Corporate Communications, Microsoft Last fall, I joined Steve in the Big Apple for New York FashionWeek where we hung out with fashion bloggers and retail reporters. It was a great chance to talk about the intersection of fashion and technology, and...

For over two years on this blog I’ve posted about a trend we call Natural User Interface (NUI) from a variety of angles. I’ve explained what it is (with the help of others), showcased technology that is driving the trend such as Kinect and why it’s much more than interfaces and input...

This is a guest post from Rick Rashid , Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer. [also available via MSR Asia’s Weibo homepage and Youku.com A demonstration I gave in Tianjin, China at Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event has started to generate a bit of attention...

The 25th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) is underway this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical and web user interfaces, tangible and ubiquitous computing, virtual and augmented...

This was one of the many provocative statements in a book by Herman Miller I read recently. Always Building is a fascinating look at what buildings could be like if we used digital technology throughout the lifecycle of a structure. It challenges many of today’s building concepts where technology...

A few months back I highlighted some work from the team at Second Story , a Portland based creative studio. They created some impressive interactive installations at the World of Coca Cola in Atlanta and used the latest Kinect SDK head tracking capability with an EL screen from Planar to create an amazing...

One of the goals of user experience design is that the technology fades into the background, so the only thing a person sees or experiences is the content and the message it conveys. I saw a great example of this recently in a browser experience of the AIDS Memorial Quilt – each panel commemorates...

Sitting in front of the television watching The Killing this weekend I did what I routinely do when the adverts come on – skipped past them as I was watching time delayed. That may all change with the advent of NUads . In October last year I mentioned NUads here on NEXT – a new interactive...

Last week I posted a video showing Kinect head tracking with a transparent display from a company called Second Story . This is just one of the cool things they’ve been up to of late using Kinect. Visitors to the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta will witness more of their work. Once you step through...

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was delighted to speak at the recent PSFK event in New York City and share some views on how technology is becoming more natural. Yesterday, PSFK published the video of my talk which you can view above. As I mention at the beginning of the talk I really do get paid to...

TED released this video yesterday and it’s circulating widely on the web today. It shows Marco Tempest employing a Kinect sensor to deliver a live augmented reality presentation and it’s pretty dazzling stuff. It’s not immediately clear from the video what is going on but some photos...

If you’re a fan of PSFK like me, you’re keen to read of the latest trends in technology. Everyone loves to share stories of how life will be made better or cooler by something being developed in a garage, university lab, or maybe a campus setting like where I work at Microsoft. It’s...

Surface 2.0 is really starting to gather some momentum and applications like this one can only push that forward. I was only remarking to a friend last week how it’d be great to see a fashion magazine using the capability of Surface to enjoy a digital light table designed for their creative production...

I’m often asked where I see Kinect going next and much like the Kinect Effect advert , I put that question back on the questioner. One of the answers I give is we see it going into more and more places outside of the living room – places like schools and hospitals. In fact in the advert,...

Towards the end of 2011 and in the first few weeks of 2012, the usual raft of technology predictions started to spread across the web. I’ve enjoyed reading many of them given that I spend my time talking to people across Microsoft about where they think the future lies and what technologies and...

GM has been working on technologies to create a more interesting travel experience for car passengers, and had the bright idea to get young creative people at the Future Lab at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Israel to help them. The Windows of Opportunity project asked students to create interactive...

I’ve shared several videos over the last month about the new Xbox 360 dashboard - it’s Metro look and Bing voice search in particular. I’ve been busy playing with the beta over that last month and Major Nelson just announced that on December 6th, the new interface will be arriving at...

Of all the topics I’ve covered in Next over the last year, natural user interface, or NUI, is the one that has probably gotten the most ink. It’s with good reasons – I personally find it a fascinating topic and like all good stories, there is much more to NUI than meets the eye. It’s...

I’ll hand it to the folks at Nokia, they give good video…this latest video from Nokia Research shows us HumanForm , a joint effort between the research team and Nokia Design. While some of the ideas in the video may seem a little far out, the Kinetic device , shown recently at Nokia World...

I’ve talked a lot about NUI here on Next at Microsoft so thought you may enjoy someone else talking about Natural User Interfaces – none other than Bill Gates. He recently gave a talk at the University of Washington and in a blog post on his birthday, he talked about The Power of the Natural...

Following the Kinect Effect ad that I showed here on Monday, our Microsoft Research (MSR) team has posted a number of great stories about their contributions to Kinect. Check out… Silicon Valley’s Kinect Contributions Kinect Body Tracking Reaps Renown Kinect Audio: Preparedness...