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One of the things I like about Richard Banks is that he's either involved in or comes across some of the most unique applications of technology. A great example of this is the work he's part of at Microsoft Research Cambridge around exploring the design implications of slow technology. Below are a couple...

  I’m catching up on TED2013 at the moment and though many sessions have caught my eye, the concluding performance by Eric Whitacre really caught my attention. Why? Well he had 100 choir members from choirs at State University, Long Beach Campus, California State University...

For years, scientists and engineers have been trying to find a smaller, more efficient way to power computers and mobile devices. It’s generally considered one of the more stubborn design obstacles to overcome in creating new types of devices. That's why the discovery of graphene in 2004 was...

  This project slipped by me when it was shown back in January at Boxpark in London. AKQA and onformative used Kinect sensors to enable consumers to immerse themselves in an installation that creates a 3D particle mirror of their body.  

The Microsoft Citizenship team announced the five winners of its Imagine Cup grants today and each solution demonstrates some really great thinking. The grand prize winner is a group of students from Germany that designed what they call an “orchestrated traffic control system.” It’s...

Every year, more than 9 million people contract tuberculosis (TB), an airborne, infectious disease that primarily attacks the lungs. When left untreated, it has a 66 percent fatality rate. It’s a grim reminder that while TB may be on the periphery for many of us, for many others it’s a harsh...

Add this to the list of amazing artistic projects making use of Kinect. It’s a project titled unnamed soundsculpture by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer of onformative who explain it as follows – but my explanation is “beautiful”. The basic idea of the project is built upon...

Going to the hospital is hardly ever fun. It’s a sterile environment full of needles and institutional décor that’s the furthest thing from making you feel comfortable. A children’s clinic in Miami set out to change all that by using technology to put patients at ease and Kinect...

Add this one to the Kinect files – another creative use of the 3D sensor. The Sonos Studio in LA is currently hosting an exhibition titled “Missing” in collaboration with The xx , media producer Aramique Krauthamer, media artist Kyle McDonald and engineer Matt Mets. The exhibition...

Remember team QuadSquad, winners of the 2012 Imagine Cup ? The Ukrainian team won the software design category with Enable Talk , a project that enables deaf individuals to communicate verbally using custom-designed sensory gloves and a smartphone application to translate sign language gestures into...

We have more young people on the planet than ever before, yet they are experiencing a rate of unemployment that is double that of the rest of the population - in some countries youth unemployment has reached 50%. If that's not shocking enough, consider that more than 100 million young people around the...

Back in April I posted about Nissan’s use of Kinect for Windows at the Chicago auto show to give prospective customers a look inside the 2013 Pathfinder – that created so much interest that Nissan took it to 16 dealerships in 13 US states. As John Brancheau, vice president of marketing at...

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...

Students from around the world are converging on Sydney now for the Imagine Cup finals . It will be the end of a process that started last October and involved multiple rounds of development and debugging until they have the perfect solution — or until development time expires, whichever comes...

Language extinction is something you don’t see in the headlines that often, at least in most English, Mandarin or Spanish-speaking countries. But of the roughly 6,800 “living” languages, about a quarter are spoken by fewer than a thousand people. And linguistic experts predict that...

Coming off the back of CES and the NRF, we’ve seen a lot of Kinect and Surface 2.0 applications. Our friends at Razorfish have have taken things a few steps further by bringing Windows Embedded , Surface , Tag , Windows Phone and Kinect for Windows together for “5D” experience. The...

Robots used to symbolize the loss of assembly line jobs, but in the last 10 – 15 years or so they’ve had a bit of an image makeover. Whenever they come up in conversation, most people will immediately think of the Roomba, or maybe a bomb disposal vehicle - but the usefulness of robots has...

Watch as WMV In case it wasn’t written on your calendars, today is World Teacher Day , your chance to make amends and show appreciation to the men and women who helped equip you for the “real world.” Cliché or not, they really do have one of the toughest, most unappreciated...

We’re always on the lookout for smart solutions to problems and not shy about pointing to stuff outside of Microsoft. I got sent a link to the video above today from @thatrobguy and it’s worth 2:14s of your time to see an ingenious solution that could change the world. Did you know that...

I spent a wonderful few hours with Bill Buxton last week and not long after read a great piece in Wired where Clive Thompson talked to Bill about his “ long nose ” theory. Bill has shamelessly borrowed from Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory and in doing so emphasizes his point –...

A couple weeks ago I featured a video of the technology and visionary talent behind Surface 2.0. Some pretty amazing stuff if you haven’t already seen it – essentially transforming a 40” HDTV into a touch screen computer on steroids. The Surface team were down in Los Angeles this...

There’s so much happening in Redmond that it’s easy to forget about the breakthroughs taking place elsewhere within the company. An excellent example is the Microsoft Innovation Lab in Cairo (CMIC), which focuses on research in the areas of mobile multimedia, social media, machine learning...

[image credit: Seattle Times ] I’m not sure if Bill Buxton has ever met Seth Godin but if not, I’d love to be there if/when it happens. The combined creative streak would likely cause an explosion – albeit one of ideas rather than rubble inducing. I’m hopeful they could solve...