TechFest

Photo Collages?  So old school...it's time to check out Video Collage.Video Collage is a compact representation of video.  It uses one automatically synthesized image to summarize the content of a video.  Video Collage selects the most representative frames from a video, extracts…

One would think that Real Time Rendering of Smoke Animation in this technological era would be a cake walk.  Well, it isn't and here's why:  Rendering of smoke presents a challenging problem in computer graphics because of its complicated effects on light propagation. Within a smoke…

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich, Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. Choose from a growing number of interactive…

What a great time for BLEWS...while blogging about politics is at an all-time high, BLEWS simplifies the debates for you...here's what I found out at TechFest 2008.  While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader…

TechFest 2008 got under way this week on the Microsoft campus and one of the most popular booths at the event was Lucid Touch.  Patrick Baudisch with Microsoft research gives us a demo but I'll give you the scoop here as well.  Touch is a compelling input modality for…

We all need our personal space, and now MS Research is working on a way to give us our personal AUDIO space. I chatted with Jasha Droppo at TechFest '07 and he gave me the lowdown on how this speaker of the future works including the creation of constructive and destructive interference and high-end…

This booth at TechFest was sooooo much fun. It made me want to run home and get on video messenger with my friends. They've taken some advanced digital effect concepts and simplified them so that we can use them in our every day internet life. You can add special effects to your videos, do it live,…

We've all gone to some website where is wants you to write in some scrambled letters into a text box. Well, that technology is boring and sometimes flawed so along came Microsoft Research to bring you asirra.com. They have joined with Petfinder to bring us the next (adorable) wave in…

A few months ago Dr. Bill Crounse and I reported to you about PlayAnywhere. Well Microsoft research does not rest on its laurels, let me assure you. They've been hard at work incorporating multiple PlayAnywhere machines together for an experience they call PlayTogether. And beyond that thay…

I couldn't resist stopping at the HD view booth at TechFest '07 because of the sheer magnitude of the camera on display. But, to my surprise and excitement - that huge camera is NOT necessary to pull off the amazing technology HD View is giving us. I chatted up Michael Cohen and he gave a quick demo…