Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Microsoft Building Shape-Shifting Touchscreen For True Tactile Touch Tech
The slick touchscreens of our iPhones and Droids are visually magnificent and the epitome of tech chic, but their slick, untextured glass screens don’t resonate with humans’ tactile nature (that’s why some people just can’t kick the hardware button keyboard). Good tactile touchscreens – screens that impart a feeling of touch or texture in sync with a displayed image – have thus far eluded device makers. A new Microsoft could change all that.
Previous attempts at tactile screens have focused largely on so-called vibrotactile displays that use small voltages at different frequencies to create the illusion of texture, but Microsoft wants to offer the real deal. The tech giant’s patent calls for pixel-sized plastic cells that can be physically manipulated to create the ridges and bumps that create a realistic touch sensation.
According to the patent filing, the technology is aimed at large displays like Microsoft’s table-sized Surface display rather than portable touchscreens – for the time being, anyhow. Surface works via a projector that beams images onto the tabletop screen from below. Users’ fingers touching the other side of the screen generate infrared reflections that are picked up by sensors below, creating touchscreen capability.
Microsoft’s patent envisions augmenting this with a shape-memory polymer that responds to light commands; when certain wavelengths of UV light hit pixels they respond accordingly, becoming harder, or softer, or protruding or retracting. Syncing this up with visual information could create the kinds of ridges and bumps that could five an image texture, or simulate the feeling of pressing real buttons rather than relying on the flat touchscreen tap iPhone users are familiar with.
Don’t put it on your Christmas list – this technology is nascent to say the very least, and Microsoft is mum on its development plans or if/when a tactile product might come to market. But the fact that a big player like Microsoft is pushing beyond vibrotactile displays is promising for the field in general. If researchers there can make it work, texting on touchscreens might never be the same.
[]
Kinect Camera Data Could Be Sold for Ad Targeting
Microsoft has detected that you need a new sofa, stat
That’s not to say that Microsoft is toying with ideas that other companies like Facebook don’t already employ, nor does it mean your Kinect is spying on you right now (although it could be – it’s probably best just not to think about it). But at a conference last week Microsoft’s Dennis Durkin, a VP in the company’s interactive department, said at a conference he would like to use the Kinect to better target the media and advertising it presents to users.
Durkin's example: among people watching a sporting event, Kinect could differentiate between what jerseys they are wearing and deduce what team or teams they support (it would ostensibly do all this while also determining how many people are watching, the gender and age breakdown of the room, etc.). Advertisers could then target all or part of that group of people.
As points out, that’s not so different from what Facebook ads do, though culling information from a public profile someone voluntarily puts on the Web is a bit different than watching someone watch TV in their skivvies at four in the morning.
Microsoft, in response, has made it clear that no data from the Kinect is being used for marketing purposes. But by toying with the idea that it might sometime in the future the company is more or less admitting that it could do so if it wanted to. This seems unlikely to go over well with privacy advocates, and may run afoul of President Obama’s new , if and when one finally materializes.
[]
Use Microsoft Surface to Control a Swarm of Robots With Your Fingertips
Mark Micire, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, proposes using Surface, Microsoft's interactive tabletop, to unite various types of data, robots and other smart technologies around a common goal. It seems so obvious and so simple, you have to wonder why this type of technology is not already widespread.
In earlier this week, Micire showed off a demo of his swarm-control interface, which you can watch below.
You can tap, touch and drag little icons to command individual robots or robot swarms. You can leave a trail of crumbs for them to follow, and you can draw paths for them in a way that looks quite like Flight Control, one of our favorite iPod/iPad games. To test his system, Micire steered a four-wheeled vehicle through a plywood maze.
The system can integrate a variety of data sets, like city maps, building blueprints and more. You can pan and zoom in on any map point, and you can even integrate video feeds from individual robots so you can see things from their perspective.
As Micire describes it, current disaster-response methods can’t automatically compile and combine information to search for patterns. A smart system would integrate data from all kinds of sources, including commanders, individuals and robots in the field, computer-generated risk models, and more.
Emergency responders might not have the time or opportunity to get in-depth training on new technologies, so a simple touchscreen control system like this would be more useful. At the very least, it seems like a much more intuitive way to control future robot armies.
[ via ]
Microsoft’s Engkoo Scans the Web to Teach Itself How to Teach You Languages
By drawing on the ever-evolving organism that is the Internet, Engkoo (loosely meaning “English vault” in Chinese) should be able to stay abreast of changes in colloquialisms and idioms in both the source language and the one it is translating to. In theory, it should also be able to catch errors or mistranslations easier, since an error is unlikely to be prevalent across the entire Web.
When a user searches for a word or sentence in either language – Microsoft plans to adapt the system for other languages but this initial phase is focused on Chinese-to-English translation – the software driving Engkoo searches through the database for the relevant data and draws upon statistics to translate as accurately as possible. Where possible it links to the sources where it drew the initial data from and often can provide example sentences for a word or phrase.
Engkoo is also a multimedia experience. Computer generated audio translations exist for many English words and sentences to help Chinese speakers with their pronunciation, and researchers are cultivating a video dictation library so users can see the way native speakers’ lips move as they enunciate.
Next up? Ultrasound images that show the movement of the tongue inside the mouth, a critical step in learning pronunciation but one that is often hidden from plain view. Researchers are already gathering ultrasound data for the library, but those of you who find that kind of imagery less-than-savory, worry not; the black-and-white ultrasounds will be converted into cartoon animation to make them a bit more – how do you say? – palatable.
There’s also a mobile app in the works that will run on Windows phones – other mobile OS types are being considered – that allows for translation on the go. Which means perhaps we’re seeing the first real baby steps toward the universal translator you can keep in your pocket for real-time translation of any language into your own.
[]
Microsoft’s Terapixel Project Creates Clearest, Biggest Night Sky Map Yet, Using More Than 3,400 Telescope Photos
The software giant’s project stitched together 1,791 pairs of red-light and blue-light plates from telescopes in California and Australia. The result is the map above, which covers the night sky of the northern and southern hemispheres.
Using and Bing maps, you can zoom in on the cosmos, peering through the dust of the Milky Way to distant galaxies. Microsoft announced Terapixel July 13 at its annual Research Faculty Summit.
To view every pixel of the image, you'd need a half-million high-definition televisions. If you tried to print it, the document would extend the length of a football field, .
The project required re-computing all the image data collected by the Digitized Sky Survey during the past 50 years. The images, produced by the Palomar telescope in California and the Schmidt telescope in Australia, each cover an area of the cosmos six and a half degrees square.
The map’s quality and clarity stems from computerized changes to the original images, which have varying levels of brightness, color saturation, noise and vignetting, which is darkening of the corners.
Developers ran parallel code on 512 computer cores in a Windows High Performance Computing cluster, and were able to process the raw digitized data in about half a day, according to Microsoft. Once the files were decompressed, they had to undergo some changes to correct the vignetting problem. Red and blue plates had to be precisely aligned to make a color image, and then everything had to be stitched together, which took about three more hours.
Terapixel then used an image optimization program to create a seamless, spherical panorama of the sky. That took about four hours, according to Microsoft.
The final image is 802 GB.
[ via ]
After 3 Years of Data Crunching, NASA and Microsoft Release Stunning New Interactive Mars Tour
NASA scientists have been crunching data for three years on more than 100 computers to come up with the brand-new Mars map. Its image collection spans the Viking orbiters nearly 40 years ago to the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is .
NASA says it was looking for a way to share its wealth of Mars images, and WorldWide Telescope was a good fit. To use it, you have to the PC-only free program, or use a Web client.
NASA says the map may lead to new scientific discoveries.
The program lets you fly through a 3-D rendering of Victoria Crater, soar past Olympus Mons and examine rock formations with surface-level detail.
In some Martian locales, you can right-click an image, and you'll find Web pages for the missions that captured them.
The 3-D effect is derived from information provided by an instrument called MOLA, the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which flew on the Mars Global Surveyor. Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., combined the data with regular images to come up with 3-D views.
The images themselves reside on the Nebula cloud at NASA-Ames.
Two NASA scientists also offer video tours. James Garvin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., walks viewers through the geological history of Mars and discusses three possible landing sites for human missions there. Carol Stoker of Ames addresses the question of whether Mars harbors life, and discusses the findings of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander.
[]
Microsoft’s New Lens Promises 3-D TVs Sans Glasses
The 2.5 million 3-D HDTV sets that are expected to land in homes this year might seem like a lot, but it's really only a drop in the TV bucket. Early adopters will always exist, but this current wave of next-gen home-theater gear has more standing in its way than price. Who wants to wear those glasses? (Especially when most 3-D TV packages only come with two pairs, with extras running at least $50 a pop.) Doesn't exactly make for the best 3-D World Cup viewing party, now does it?
We've seen small-scale glasses-free 3-D displays before, like the LCD screen on that use light directed at each eye individually to deliver a stereoscopic image. Microsoft's display does a similar trick, but on a much larger scale. Their lens has a series of LEDs along the bottom edge of the screen that switch off and on rapidly and at varying angles to control where the light goes.
The screen can deliver a 3-D image to two different viewers' eyes at once. In order to do so, its onboard computer has to track their eyes to target the light to each individual. In the past, such systems have been very bulky to account for air space needed between the lens and projector; Microsoft's design, though, uses a lens that tapers from 11 millimeters thick at the top to six millimeters at the bottom. This taper means that the light can travel through the lens instead of thin air, Applied Sciences Group Director Steven Bathiche told Technology Review, meaning the entire setup can substantially shrink in size.
Light from the diodes enters the lens along the bottom and bounces through the lens until it reaches the proper viewing angle, at which point it escapes.
Though the setup currently only has a viewing angle of about 20 to 40 degrees, it's still early in the development stages. One day the lens could oust the now-conventional backlight in LCD HDTVs to bring home a glasses-less screen.
[]