So today it was Microsoft Research’s turn to crow, and RickRashid kicked off with a much more sober and academic presentation than the previous two days. He spent alot of time laying out why basic research is so important to Microsoft, and also showing how successful they have been. For example they now have over 800 PHD level staff, and at a typical academic tech conference, between 10 and 30 percent of the papers are authored by Microsoft researchers. Wow! It does clearly demonstrate the shift in recent years between pure academic sponsored reseach and corporate research – I’m not sure that entirely a good thing from an independance point of view, but you can’t argue it has accelerated the industry.
So the things that stuck in my mind from the keynote were:
SecondLight:
A system for providing a second layer of user interface above the primary surface of a multi-touch user interface. So for example, by holding a translucent surface, such as a piece of tissue paper, above a surface displaying, for example, a map, a second set of information such as a satelite view is projected onto the translucent surface. Its pretty amazing to see. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332945,00.asp
Mesh Sensors
A network of low power, self-networking sensors that report back data to a Cloud app. What was particularly neat about this was the ability for many different organisations to share and work on the sensor data. The demo showed sensor data over time from the conference venue, and also in the environment, with data displayed on a virtual earth map
Boku
A cool new way to teach programing to kids. This was a stunning display of how kids could learn basic programming principles in a fun way that allows them to build really complex and exciting games. The point MS were making is that programming should be a life skill, not just for geeks, and that its just the complexity of current programming environments that stop people learning it. This is there attempt to get around that
Virtual Telescope Release 2
Some stunning visuals in this presentation which now has twice the data and much better simulation tech to go from a planets surface to the farthest view of the universe. Already a huge hit with astronomers, this will make it even more popular, and also illustrates some great UI and graphics techniques.
Don’t forget all the PDC keynotes and other sessions are available the next day from the PDC web-site
