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 Academic Search Powered by Silverlight

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

Its an awesome resource for Computer Science Students.

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.

Intel® Anti-Theft Technology Demo

Find out how laptop security measures can help protect your data.

Intel® Anti-Theft Technology (Intel® AT) for Laptop Security

What is it?

Intel® Anti-Theft Technology is an intelligent way for you to help secure the mobile assets of your workforce. This intelligent laptop security technology is built into select 2nd generation Intel® Core™ and 2nd generation Intel® Core™ vPro™ processor families. If a laptop is lost or stolen when the user is out of the office, the PC will be shut down and useless to thieves. It not only helps protect the intellectual property of your company at the pre-boot level, but also allows for fast reinstatement of a laptop without damage to information, should the laptop be recovered. Intel AT is available on select 2nd generation Intel Core and 2nd generation Intel Core vPro processorfamily–based laptops when activated with a service subscription from an Intel AT-enabled service.

Why it matters.

Laptop theft costs corporate America over USD 5.4 billion each year.¹ In everyday life, this amounts to 12,000 laptops disappearing every week from U.S. airports alone, and a laptop being stolen every 53 seconds.¹ The problem of data security becomes increasingly significant as employees are more mobile. Add to this the daunting challenges of healthcare privacy laws, and asset security can have a significant impact on your business.

Protection for laptop users.

Intel Anti-Theft Technology (Intel AT) is built into the processor of your laptop, so it is active as soon as your machine is switched on—even before startup. If your laptop is lost or stolen, a local or remote “poison pill” can be activated that renders the PC inoperable by blocking the boot process. This means that predators cannot hack into your system at startup. It works even without Internet access and, unlike many other solutions, is hardware-based, so it is tamper-resistant.

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

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.

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.

Aided Eyes: Eye Activity Sensing for Daily Life

Another cool project from Microsoft Research: Aided Eyes demoed at Innovation conference,Asia.

 

 

Here is the description mentioned in the blog,

Our eyes collect a considerable amount of information when we use them to look at objects. In particular, eye movement allows us to gaze at an object and shows our level of interest in the object. In this research, we propose a method that involves real-time measurement of eye movement for human memory enhancement; the method employs gaze-indexed images captured using a video camera that is attached to
the user’s glasses.

We present a prototype system with an infrared-based corneal limbus tracking method. Although the existing eye tracker systems track eye movement with high accuracy, they are not suitable for daily use because
the mobility of these systems is incompatible with a high sampling rate. Our prototype has small phototransistors, infrared LEDs, and a video camera, which make it possible to attach the entire system to the glasses. Additionally, the accuracy of this method is compensated by combining image processing methods and contextual information, such as eye direction, for information extraction. We develop an information extraction system with real-time object recognition in the user’s visual attention area by using the prototype of an eye tracker and a head-mounted camera.

We apply this system to (1) fast object recognition by using a SURF descriptor that is limited to the gaze area and (2) descriptor matching of a past-images database. Face recognition by using haar-like object features and text logging by using OCR technology is also implemented. The combination of a low-resolution camera and a high-resolution, wide-angle camera is studied for high daily usability. The possibility of gaze-guided computer vision is discussed in this paper, as is the topic of communication by the photo transistor in the eye tracker and the development of a sensor system that has
a high transparency.

Source

Innovation At Microsoft Video

Mobile Surface = Future of Computing

We all know Microsoft Surface. Though its an amazing technology and works pretty well,still it didn't find its way into consumer mainstream. Because its costly,huge,not portable. Now here comes its cousin Mobile Surface which I think is going to be the future of Computing. The next generation of interfaces,NUI. It is a novel interaction system for mobile computing. Our goal is to bring Microsoft Surface experience to mobile scenarios, and more importantly, to enable 3D interaction with mobile devices. We do research on how to transform any surface (e.g., a coffee table or a piece of paper) to Mobile Surface with a mobile device and a camera-projector system. Besides this, our work also includes how to get 3D object model in real-time, augmented reality and multiple-layer 3D information presentation.

More details: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mobilesurface/default.aspx

Microsoft’s New Research Project Stereoscopic 3D environment

Craig Mundie showed a demo of a stereoscopic 3D environment. He played a multiplayer game and showed a retail experience blending virtual and physical environments.I collected news on various sites regarding this matter,

Microsoft's Craig Mundie visited Duke University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this week to show off forthcoming NUIs (natural user interfaces), involving "a large stereoscopic 3D goggles that showed some of the possibilities of human-scale computer interaction," and company's soon-to-be-released Kinect controller.

He provided demonstrations that showed "what it might be like to interact with a computer ... the size of a room," the company says. Craig was able to "walk into a 3D world where he could shop and play games, interacting with people in both physical and virtual environment in a very natural way." from ditti.com

“Sadly, unless we send each of you a set of 3D glasses it’s hard to recreate the experience, so you’ll have to trust me on this one when I say it was pretty incredible. Craig was able to walk into a 3D world where he could shop and play games, interacting with people in both the physical and virtual environment in a very natural way. I hope to be showing you more of the short clip from “The Spy from the 2080s” video he used so stay tuned on that one.” from Microsoft Blog

New SocialGadgets from FUSE Labs

Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs was started by Ray Ozzie and is run by Lili Cheng. The group focuses on real-time and media rich experiences and is located in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, and Cambridge, UK.Their earlier projects include Spindex, Kodu, Project Emporia, Docs, Bing Twitter, Bing Twitter maps. Now they have introduced new project called Social Gadgets.Here is the description of the project.

Visual exploration of Twitter topics

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words. And when analyzing the massive amounts of data generated by Twitter, this adage could not be more appropriate. FUSE Labs’ SocialGadgets are a set of embeddable widgets that visualize Twitter real-time data. Each gadget focuses on a given keyword and displays its volume of usage over time. Mentioned entities such as people, locations, companies and noun phrases are identified and visually represented. The gadgets are interactive, letting users explore the relationships between topics publically shared on Twitter. By focusing on patterns and trends, the gadgets can extrapolate what people find important, and provide a succinct yet effective way to look at events as they are unfolding.

Twitter, 'the pulse of the world,' is an incredibly rich data source used by millions across the globe. People post their thoughts, ideas and whereabouts via text-based status updates. Visually displaying trending topics can help readers better understand content and its context. By using any one of the four SocialGadgets, data flowing through the Twitter fire hose is indexed and semantically analyzed in real-time. Within minutes, major entities are identified and their relationships are displayed. The gadgets are easily configured, allowing users to choose a keyword and a template type, then copy and paste an embed code to be displayed on a website of their choice.

 

You can try and customize it for your site: http://designer.socialgadgets.fuselabs.com/?template=A

Microsoft LightSpace

Microsoft Research always comes up with cool concepts,prototypes. Two Researchers from MSR’s Redmond Lab have come up with this cool concept of LightSpace taking surface computing to next level.Here is the description from MSR’s Projects Page. I tried to embed Silverlight Smooth Streaming player to show the video, but it didn't work.

Combining Multiple Depth Cameras and Projectors for Interactions On, Above, and Between Surfaces

Instrumented with multiple depth cameras and projectors, LightSpace is a small room installation designed to explore a variety of interactions and computational strategies relat-ed to interactive displays and the space that they inhabit. LightSpace cameras and projectors are calibrated to 3D real world coordinates, allowing for projection of graphics correctly onto any surface visible by both camera and projector. Selective projection of the depth camera data enables emulation of interactive displays on un-instrumented surfaces (such as a standard table or office desk), as well as facilitates mid-air interactions between and around these displays. For example, after performing multi-touch interactions on a virtual object on the tabletop, the user may transfer the object to another display by simultaneously touching the object and the destination display. Or the user may “pick up” the object by sweeping it into their hand, see it sitting in their hand as they walk over to an interactive wall display, and “drop” the object onto the wall by touching it with their other hand. We detail the interactions and algorithms unique to LightSpace, discuss some initial observations of use and suggest future directions.