Show Us Your Tech: Inside the Jellybean

Last week I got a chance to attend The Garage Science Fair at the 2011 Hardware Summit. The Garage at Microsoft is a place for employees to collaborate on interesting side-projects and share knowledge. A few times a year they put on Science Fairs where employees can show their creations to the rest of us 'Softies. Volunteer judges review the projects and recognize projects that caught their eye. Today we'll look at some of the projects and talk to some of the participants. See this blog and this video to learn about the previous Science Fair.
So to clarify, these are Microsoft employees who are building hardware projects as a personal side project or as an extension of their day jobs. Science Fairs let employees show off these projects to other employees who might like to collaborate with them.
You can access the code for the Mayhem project on CodePlex: http://makemayhem.codeplex.com/. Project details here: https://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/mayhem.aspx
An explanation of the techniques used in the 3D Face Scanner can be found here: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/UM/People/yasumat/tutorial/Photometric3DModeling_ICIP2010.pdf
Last link The research behind the Whiteboard project can be found here: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/zhang/Whiteboard/