Digital Narratives From Microsoft Research

 

The Microsoft Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) project aims to combine traditional forms of storytelling with new visualization technologies to create compelling interactive digital narratives. Experience sample narratives created using the technology at http://www.digitalnarratives.net. The RIN project is an undertaking by MSR India in collaboration with the Interactive Visual Experience group in MSR Redmond and the MSR External Research group. RIN supports a large number of media formats; standard audio and video formats, text, as well as the new formats such as Microsoft® Photosynth™, Deep Zoom™, etc. New visualization formats can be incorporated by adding dynamically-loadable plugins.

Technology

The Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) technology consists of:

1. The RIN Data Model - a structured, extensible, and platform-independent representation for narratives (it's XML manifestation can be considered a kind of "HTML for RINs")
2. A Silverlight RIN player
3. Silverlight plugins for "foundational Experience Streams", each of which brings a specific visualization experience (such as maps, panoramas, Deep Zoom images) into the realm of RINs
4. Authoring tools to create RIN content

While we have invested in a Silverlight player and plugins, there is nothing in the technology that precludes creating a player and plugins for other platforms, such as HTML5/JavaScript.

RIN is prototype technology. The RIN technology has its origins in the "Sri Andal Temple project" in 2008. The temple demo featured an application that led users through an immersive, interactive, narrated walkthrough Photosynth's and HD View stitched images of a temple in Tamil Nadu (video). Several core RIN concepts such as "Experience Streams" and "Generalized Trajectories" originated in that project.

Keep checking www.digitalnarratives.net for updates. You can find details about the RIN technology at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/rin/

Microsoft Surface Alternative Using Kinect And PC

Design Lab Experience 001 from Disturbance on Vimeo.

Disturbance offers a first demo, "Design lab experience 001" which introduces interactive table "touchless" created in a few hours.

A glass table, IR sensor, a webcam, a video projector, a mirror and a Mac, this is everything needed to make this prototype behavior and convincing potential: no necessary contact sensor analyzes gesture in space to transform it into information.

A long series of exciting technology/design experiments should follow soon!

Microsoft Releases OneNote Mobile For iPhone

OneNote Mobile for the iPhone lets you capture and review notes and lists on your phone. Notes are automatically backed up and synced with free Windows Live SkyDriveonline storage, so that you can access them from virtually anywhere - your PC, phone, and browser. Collecting thoughts and ideas on the go is what OneNote was made for.

And its free only for limited time. So grab it soon.

http://bit.ly/gtaiTd

Microsoft Academic Search Powered by Silverlight

Try it out here: http://www.academic.research.microsoft.com/

Its an awesome resource for Computer Science Students.

Max Payne Using Kinect Hack And Wiimote

The Chase Film- An Intel Core-i Series Ad

Microsoft Surface 2.0 Announced

Photo credit: Long Zheng – www.istartedsomething.com) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/longzheng/5328368222)

Some details:

Impressively thin table surface for Surface

- Surface 2.0 is mountable.

- No cameras included. Each pixel is a camera. Yup,pixelsense technology.

- Surface has the biggest piece of Gorilla Glass ever produced.

No word and pricing and availability. Steve Ballmer will reveal that at CES keynote I guess.

Created in partnership with Samsung, the Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface incorporates all the key features of the original Surface product – a massive multi-touch experience, the ability to recognize fingers, hands, and objects – as well as a new technology that has enabled a more flexible form factor.

The Next Generation of Microsoft Surface - LCDs That Can ‘See’

Also during Ballmer’s keynote speech, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of Microsoft Surface, built upon a new technology that enables thin LCD screens to “see” without the use of cameras.

Created in partnership with Samsung, the Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface is a major step forward in the surface computing category. It incorporates all the key features of the original Surface product – a massive multi-touch experience, the ability to recognize fingers, hands, and objects – as well as a new technology that has enabled a more flexible form factor.

Just Scratching the Surface

Looking at the year ahead, Ballmer noted that it is an exciting time for Microsoft, partners and customers across the board. Even with all the amazing experiences talked about at CES, from what’s next in Windows to the latest capabilities with Kinect, “the best is yet to come,” he said.

Control Boxee Using Kinect

Kinect Does Everything ! ! !

Virtual Reality Through Kinect Hack

Translated using Google from the blog.

Since I bought a head impatiently the end, made in conjunction with motion capture other day, I made a virtual reality environment to enjoy at home.

HMD is doing is rotating the camera angle based on the information, OpenNI only fixed to the head of the joint inputs. Were able to build a virtual reality environment to be able to reflect movement of the body by itself without any special equipment.

This is the second demonstration was held in Nagoya May 18, 12 CV · PRML what you will be presented at the seminar, a video clip when I get a little plus.

State that can be seen moving their limbs and face down a little. The scene is reflected in their non-work your body is feeling very strange and interesting.

In addition, Bullet in the physics of moving objects can interfere so, kicking the ball directly in his body, and can be 弾Ki返Shi the head.

However, HMD compared to the narrow angle of human vision, and that the actual position of the limbs, such as drawing range of video cameras, and the full reality of the movement is shaking his head when they work together to because you are not situations that require fine movement is really strange remains.

Work and kick the ball, not the position of the foot are visible, but I have to aim 蹴Ranai real space, especially in the toe kick of a place that I recognized the error of motion partly Naka Naka difficult.

The bounce in the minute hand is seen in front of me, but tends to do rather than feet, so freedom can not easily get used to the slippery sense of distance, and so did not qualify Ikana. The block face like I've been in my head, so when you bounce because of the people in the main specification, this is an enjoyable atmosphere without feeling so good people do it properly move in space. When it works there is pleasant enough to hit something in the amount of illusion.

VR can look up at the large object in the environment, and any sense of what will look down from above or wanted to do so once tried. As expected on the whole, very amazing realism. Especially from a high place overlooking, CG a little fear can be felt as even know it. But there were also comments to get used to overcome a fear of heights might be nice.

Scenes look up something huge, run pretty well myself, I looked up in his own interesting experiences with a bit of astral projection. TPS and happily run around with the camera fixed behind their movement, such as can be seen.

I've tried the scene to capture other monsters animals and humans in the Making of the movies and games, 面白Katsu not easily give it also put on the motion of different models of the constitution and your watching the reactions of the screen or.

Move your home PC range is narrow so there is only about 1m in front of square, is a little disappointing they've been limited work a lot. Like they're afraid of a little finger or foot hit the guard desk.

kinect itself seems so far recognized as such even if the distance, can cope with the action should be used in larger more spacious room.

In addition, VR920 is compatible with itself is stereopsis, need to send separate images to calculate the left and right eye properly, easy to grasp the sense of distance more likely. Wii limbs and the rest if you give feedback vibration upon contact with the remote control to put quotation, I think how I feel now I think even more.

Even so, the VR environment can be reflected until the motion, and they can be realized only by a combination of commercially available products in the home without special equipment of the ordinary, something I had really great times, and think again.

Source: Hatena

Change Your Windows Blue Screen To Other Colors

Now you no longer need to look at your Blue Screen when your system crashes. Choose your fav.color,its cool isnt't? Mark Russinovich is the guy behind this work. Who is he? Mark E. Russinovich (1966) is a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft. He was a cofounder of software producers Sysinternals before it was acquired by Microsoft.

Preparing the System

Because you’re going to modify kernel code, the first step is to enable the ability to edit kernel code in memory if it’s not already enabled. Windows systems with less than 2 GB of RAM uses 4KB pages to store kernel code, so can protect pages with the protection most suitable for the contents they contain. For instance, kernel data pages should allow both read and write access while kernel code should only allow read and execute access. As an optimization that helps improve the speed of virtual address translations, Windows uses large pages (4 MB on x86 and x64) on larger systems. That means that if there’s both code and data stored in a page, the page must allow read, write and execute accesses, so to ensure that you can edit a page, you have to encourage Windows to use large pages. If your system is Windows XP or Server 2003 and has less than 256 MB, or is Windows Vista or higher and has 2 GB or less of RAM, create a REG_DWORD value called LargePageMinimum that’s set to 1 under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management:

So that you don’t have to rush to show off your handiwork before Windows automatically reboots after the crash, change the auto-reboot setting. On Windows XP and Server 2003, right-click on My Computer, select the Advanced Tab, and press the Settings button in the “Startup and Recovery” section. On Windows Vista and higher, right-click on Computer in the Start Menu, select properties to open the Properties dialog, click Advanced System Settings, select the Advanced tab and press the Settings button in the “Startup and Recovery” section. Finally, uncheck the “Automatically restart” checkbox:

If you’re running 64-bit Windows Vista or higher, you need to boot the system in Debug mode so that you can run the kernel debugger in “local” mode. You can do that either by selecting F8 during the system boot and choosing the Debug boot or by checking the Debug checkbox in the System Configuration (Msconfig) utility:

Next, reboot the system and start the debugger with administrator rights (if UAC is on, run it as administrator). Point the debugger at the Microsoft symbol server by opening the Symbol Search Path dialog under the File menu and enter this string: srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols (replace c:\symbols with whatever local directory in which you want the debugger to store cached symbols). Next, open the Kernel Debugging dialog from the File menu, click the Local page, and press OK:

The subsequent steps vary depending on whether you’re running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows and whether it’s Windows Vista or newer.

32-bit Windows XP and Windows Server 2003

The function that displays the bluescreen on these operating systems is KeBugCheck2. You’re looking for the place where the function passes the color value to the function that fills the screen background, InbvSolidColorFill. Enter the command “u kebugcheck2” to list the start of the function, then enter the “u” command to dump additional pages of the function’s code until you see the reference to InbvSolidColorFill (after entering “u” once, you can just press enter to repeat the command). You’ll need to dump 30-40 pages before you come across the one with the call:

Preceding the call, you’ll see an instruction that has the number 4 as its argument (“push 4”), as you can see above. Copy the code address of that instruction by selecting it from the address column on the left and typing Ctrl+C. Then in the debugger command window, type “eb “, then Ctrl+V to paste the address, then “+1”, then enter. The debugger will go into memory editing mode, starting with the address of the color value. Now you can choose the color you want. 1 is red, 2 is green, and you can experiment if you want a different color. Simply enter the number and press enter twice to commit it and exit editing mode. Here’s what the screen should look like after you’re done:

64-bit Versions of Windows and 32-bit Windows Vista and Higher

On these versions of Windows, the core bluescreen drawing function is KiDisplayBlueScreen. Type “u kidisplaybluescreen” and then continue entering “u” commands to dump pages of the function until you see the call to InbvSolidColorFill. On 32-bit versions of Windows, continue by following the instructions given in the Windows XP/Server 2003 section to find and edit the color value. On 64-bit versions of these operating systems, the instruction preceding the call to InvbSolidColorFill is the one that passes the color, so copy its address (the number in the left column) and enter this command to edit it: “eb <address>+4”. The debugger will go into memory editing mode and you can change the value (e.g. 1 for red, 2 for green):

Viewing the Result

You’re now ready to crash the system. If you’re running 64-bit Windows, you might get a crash without doing anything additionally. That’s because Kernel Patch Protection will notice the modification and crash the system as a deterrent to ISVs that might consider modifying the kernel’s code to change its behavior. There might be a delay of up to several minutes before that happens, though. To generate a crash on demand, run the Notmyfault tool (you can download it from the Windows Internals book page) and press the “Do Bug” button (to avoid data loss, make sure you’ve saved any work and closed all other applications):

You’ll now get a bluescreen in the color you picked, in this case the red screen of death:

The Holiday Bluescreen

In the spirit of the holiday season, I took things one step further to generate a holiday-themed bluescreen: not only did I modify the background color, but the text color as well. To do this on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista or higher, note the call to InvbSetTextColor immediately following the one to InvbSolidColorFill and the address of the instruction that passes the text color to the function, “move ecx, 0Fh”:

The 0Fh parameter represents white, but you can change it using the same editing technique. Use the “eb” command, passing the address of the instruction plus 1. Here I set the color to red (which is a value of 1):

And here’s the festive bluescreen I produced:

Happy holidays! And remember, if you have any troubleshooting cases you want to share, please send me screenshots (.PNG preferred) and log files.

Source: Mark's Technet blog

Microsoft’s Tablet 2.0 Work Behind The Scenes?

Michel talks about the “fat finger problem” and show us a few demos on Surface and a Tablet PC. Things get really interesting when he whips out a smartphone and uses movement to change the UI on the phone – moving the phone up and down for zoom for example. For those of you who are followers of this kind of stuff, you may have seen Bill Buxton show some of this work.

Source: MSR

Microsoft Research’s Street Slide Now Live in Bing Maps For Mobile

Microsoft Research showed its research project called street slide just few months ago and its already implemented in Bing maps for mobile in someway. Take a look at the streetside demo shown at Bing search summit yesterday and then watch the video below from Microsoft research released months ago.

Change Your Facebook Look/Theme

Telerik f!acedeck is a Silverlight-based, client application for Facebook. This product, formerly known as “Microsoft Client for Facebook Beta,” is now available with the name Telerik f!acedeck and is being offered as a free tool by Telerik. Install Telerik f!acedeck and enjoy the unforgettable user experience that the application provides.

All you need in order to install Telerik f!acedeck is Silverlight 4. Download it here and to download facedeck visit www.facedeck.telerik.com

Tweet search - one code, three mobile platforms (wp7, monodroid, monotouch) (via Sigurd Snørteland)

Interesting article..

Here is the presentation and the source code from the speech I held at the Norwegian .Net User Group last wednesday. tweet search 'tweet search' is a mobile twitter search app written in c# for Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android. All three apps share the same twitter search code, but they have custom gui code (WP7=Silverlight, iPhone=MonoTouch, Android=MonoDroid). Go to the bottom off this article to find links to the source code & presentat … Read More

via Sigurd Snørteland

New Ad for Kinect for Xbox 360

Silverlight Future Revealed ? ?

Future of silverlight event is scheduled for December-3. Here is the two interesting job posts..

Job Category: Software Engineering: Development
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Job ID: 739404 29796
Product: Microsoft Silverlight
Division: Server & Tools Business

Silverlight is a fast paced, fun and winning team that ships yearly and is making serious inroads in the marketplace. Come join one of the best team's at Microsoft and take your work to the next level by helping us deliver ground breaking graphics, and UI advances.
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, developer platform that is based on XAML and already running on Windows, Mac, set-top-boxes and Windows Phones. Numerous industry partners are already using Silverlight to deliver high end and cutting edge internet and mobile experiences to millions of users, including Netflix, NBC Olympics, Seesmic, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Microsoft teams such as Bing Maps, Sql reporting services, Office Communicator are already using Silverlight and many more will be in the future.
As a developer you will be responsible for delivering features for several upcoming devices and shipping devices like the Windows Phone.
Candidates must have 5+ years of professional development experience in C++ and a willingness to work on new operating systems and languages.

Apply

Job Category: Software Engineering: Development
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Job ID: 740317 29869
Product: Microsoft Silverlight
Division: Server & Tools Business

Silverlight is looking to hire motivated developers with a passion for creating ground breaking multiscreen platform experiences now targeting the XBOX.
Silverlight is a fast paced, fun and winning team that ships yearly and is making serious inroads in the marketplace. It is a cross-browser, cross-platform, developer platform that is based on XAML and already running on Windows, Mac, set-top-boxes and Windows Phones. Numerous industry partners are already using Silverlight to deliver high end and cutting edge internet and mobile experiences to millions of users, including Netflix, NBC Olympics, Seesmic, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Microsoft teams such as Sql reporting services, Office Communicator are already using Silverlight and many more will be in the future.
One of the unique things about our team is how closely we partner with customers to make them successful with our technology - whether it’s one of the thousands of applications developed for Windows Phone 7, social network applications such as Seesmic, or powering the largest premium internet movie service through Netflix. With our next wave of releases we are looking to increase by an order of magnitude our usage, customer base and reach.
As a developer you will be responsible for delivering features for Silverlight on the XBOX as part of the next wave.
Candidates must have 5+ years of professional development experience in C++ and a willingness to work on new operating systems and languages.

Apply

Only scott Guthrie knows what he is going to reveal on that day..

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office Signup

Google based on its Docverse acquisition has announced Cloud connect. Following is the description given in blog.

For those of you who have not made the full move to Google Docs and are still using Microsoft Office, Google has something great to offer. With Cloud Connect, people can continue to use the familiar Office interface, while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy.
Users of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can sync their Office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving Office. Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version.
Once in the Google cloud, documents can be easily shared and even simultaneously edited by multiple people, from right within Office. A full revision history is kept as the files are edited, and users can revert to earlier versions in one click. These are all features that Google Docs users already enjoy today, and now we’re bringing them to Microsoft Office.

Sign up here

Earth Attack Built On HTML 5 In Microsoft IE9

A teaser posted on internet. I expect more from IE9 .

Microsoft’s New Tag Line “Be What’s Next” Video

Microsoft applied for trademark over “Be What’s Next” last month. Now it has started using it aggressively in its marketing materials. Personally I liked “Your Potential Our Passion” over the new one. In the recent SQL PASS conference a Microsoft executive shouted Be What’s Next after demonstrating the new Silverlight powered Project Crescent. Here is the details about it.

Long Zheng from istartedsomething have posted a photo of handouts with new tag line. The below video was found in vimeo with description

Mondo Robot hired me to help create some animated segments to go into a 5-minute video for Microsoft. Dubbed "the innovation video," it featured three different things microsoft is developing that they want to share with university students, in the hopes of getting them interested in working for the Gates-ster himself.

Image Credit: Istartedsomething.com

ImageFlow–A New Way To Search Images From Microsoft Research

Microsoft has releases a paper on a new way to search and browse images on web. Here is the description from the paper.

Traditional grid and list representations of image search results are the dominant interaction paradigms that users face on a daily basis, yet it is unclear that such paradigms are well-suited for experiences where the user‟s task is to browse images for leisure, to discover new information or to seek particular images to represent ideas. We introduce ImageFlow, a novel image search user interface that explores a different alternative to the traditional presentation of image search results. ImageFlow presents image results on a canvas where we map semantic features (e.g., relevance, related queries) to the canvas‟ spatial dimensions (e.g., x, y, z) in a way that allows for several levels of engagement – from passively viewing a stream of images, to seamlessly navigating through the semantic space and actively collecting images for sharing and reuse. We have implemented our system as a fully functioning prototype, and we report on promising, preliminary usage results.

This is what it does,

We present and implement ImageFlow, a novel image search interface that explores an alternate approach to satisfying core user activities around image search tasks. ImageFlow streams images towards the user in a 3D-like environment and supports both the passive and active exploration of a search result set. A user can type an initial query into a search box and then passively observe images as they flow towards the user. A user can also interact with the system by steering through the flow of images with the mouse. ImageFlow also introduces a new way to explore different semantic and image attributes by mapping them onto its canvas‟s spatial dimensions. 

More details here.