Microsoft opened its 15th TechFest to journalists last week, unveiling up to 100 innovations — some significant, but most of which will never appear in public.
This was a controversial move, since the annual event’s main purpose is to provide thousands of staff based in Redmond with the chance to check out and perhaps “productise” developments from Microsoft Research centres in faraway Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Bangalore and Beijing.
It was a wonderfully cosmopolitan event. There were 75 journalists from as far afield as the Russian Federation and Australia, with a sizeable contingent representing India. The Cambridge lab, representing the United Kingdom, put on a sterling show. Two projects it showed off were Text2Paper and Text-It-Notes, which reflect the importance of cellphone SMSing in the UK.
Text2Paper is a little wall-mounted printer that prints SMS messages on sticky labels that you can plonk on a paper calendar or whatever. Microsoft says it bridges “the generational divide between those that are comfortable with paper (typically the parents) and those comfortable with the cellphone (the teens)”.
Text-It-Notes does the bridging thing in reverse. It uses handwriting recognition so that a parent can scribble a message on a Post-It note and have it automatically sent via SMS to a mobile phone.
These aren’t intended to be products; they’re sociological experiments. However, I did see a couple of programs I could easily be tempted to buy. The first demo was Improved Podcast Authoring with Speech Recognition. Basically, you record something and run it through an automatic speech-recognition routine. Then you can edit the WAV file simply by editing the text, so it takes less than a second to remove an “um” or an “er, er, er”.
Another was Dynamic Noise Reduction, demonstrated by Jasha Droppo. He has developed an algorithm that does an amazing job of cleaning up recorded speech files.
On the imaging side there was HDView, an Internet Explorer plug-in that lets you scroll around and zoom in on multi-gigapixel images. Don’t have any? MSR has software that will stitch together 800 or so separate pictures into one huge 360-degree panorama.
The project uses the new HD Photo format, formerly called Windows Media Photo, which is already supported in Vista. Apparently, Microsoft intends to offer this as a standard to replace the JPG image format.
And, as usual, Andy Wilson impressed with some “surface computing” ideas. One of his demos, dubbed Zune Buggy, lets you drive virtual cars over a real landscape, such as a table top covered with bits of folded paper, thanks to an overhead depth-sensing camera. Wilson used an Xbox controller to drive a car over someone’s hand and up their arm. Whether or not this kind of thing ever finds a practical use, it was, like TechFest 07, great fun. — Guardian Unlimited Â