Avalon

I like the idea of tabs in explorer, it would keep things a lot more cleaner, in line with the whole 'vista' clarity thing.

What about Project M. Whats that all about? I thought that had something to do with the shell and explorer

Scoble, why have you never done a video on the graphic design team at Microsoft?  I know that you obviously couldnt show any conceptual designs for any new user interfaces, such as vista itself, but if you think about it, it's these guys that are actually helping reshape the future. I remember watching a video on winsupersite from i think it was pdc 2003 which showed some concepts from Vista and thought that they looked so amazing. Now its pretty well known that Microsoft have something up their sleeves which we may see in beta 2, or rc1 or may not even see until the final release next year. I'd like to know more about these guys that are working on this amazingly new UI, and hear them talk about the work that they've done and what is ahead. Id like to know more about the team, and hear them talk about the things they have designed in the past. ie, Media player 10, media center, why the ui change in office 2003 etc and where the hell did they get that longhorn grass from??! id just like to hear them talk about things, like how different is it to work with avalon and so on and on..

They obviously knew about the vista name before many of the main vista development team because they had to come up with the vista motion videos and graphics in advance.

Im not being critical of your work, infact, i cant get enough of it! but you have to admit, most of the videos we see are from the 'development' side of microsoft. Its always good to see what else goes on at microsoft. i loved the video you did of the recruitment process for instance. I cant think of a better video than one of the Graphic design team.

How about it??!

For anyone else who's interested, you can find out a little bit more about the microsoft designers here http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/people.html

10 minutes of Steves time is worth a lot of money.

What you should have asked him was "What will Longhorn be called?" because I bet Steve, Bill and a very small few others know exactly what it will be named.

I'm sure they have a handfull of names to choose from, from Windows 2007 to eXPedition but I bet theyre already set on one of them. 

How far between the beta or Release candidates and the RTM of XP was there for the code name change of Whistler to XP title?  Will we first hear of it during PDC? or early next year during the RC stages? As the marketing team and graphic designers all need time to start designing logos and branding to be ready for this time next year. Let alone the guy who needs to run a name check through the code to change any longhorn references to the new title.  Does the M in Project M give something away?  I'm sure longhorn server will be called Windows Server 2007. Im sure Internet explorer in Longhorn will be called Internet Explorer 7 Enhanced, but what about Windows?

Can anyone guess What words begin with M that would fit the bill? 

i'm quite interested in the possibility of adding a depth-of-field property to the 3d viewport. The ability to render the depth-of-field effect is an important feature of any image synthesis algorithm.

Depth-of-field is inherent to camera models with lens of finite aperture, in computer graphics the most commonly used camera model is the pinhole camera, where the lens is supposed to be infinitely small.
 
The pinhole camera model produces images that are in sharp focus in any distance from the viewer. This can be a desired feature (e.g. for technical visualizations), but often a more realistic 3D image including depth-of-field is required.

Post filtering algorithms suffer from intensity leakage, and algorithms that solve those problems are currently slow, especially for large amounts of depth-blur.

The solution may be in pointbased graphics - an algorithm enabling fast depth-of-field rendering for point-based objects.

Anyway I could talk about this stuff all night. Avalon is still in its infancy, who knows what its capabilities may hold.