At Microsoft Research TechFest 2009, Researcher Ivan Tashev, right, gives Craig Mundie, center, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, and Rick Rashid, left, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, a glimpse of the future of driving with Commute UX, a research project designed to allow drivers to more easily interact with devices and information in their cars, using technologies such as speech and touch. Redmond, Wash., Feb. 24, 2009.

This TechFest demo demonstrates technologies to enhance the user experience in multiparty conferencing by using highly realistic, immersive spatial audio for loudspeakers and headphones.

This TechFest demo demonstrates technologies to enhance the user experience in multiparty conferencing by using highly realistic, immersive spatial audio for loudspeakers and headphones.

This project displays a conversational agent that can act as a receptionist as an example of enabling a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about their surroundings and embed interaction deeply into the natural flow of everyday tasks, activities and collaborations.

This project displays a conversational agent that can act as a receptionist as an example of enabling a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about their surroundings and embed interaction deeply into the natural flow of everyday tasks, activities and collaborations.

This project displays a conversational agent that can act as a receptionist as an example of enabling a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about their surroundings and embed interaction deeply into the natural flow of everyday tasks, activities and collaborations.

Racks of servers on display during TechFest 2009 include experimental prototypes of low-power processors for datacenters that deliver one-third to half the performance of high-performance processors while consuming only 5 percent to 10 percent as much power.

Graphs demonstrate the dynamics involved in developing recommendation systems that can collect and weigh the various opinions communicated across a social network.

In a home or office environment, sticky notes can provide a useful context surrounding the space in which a computer is used, but that context is not available for mobile users. This TechFest demonstration explores the use of virtual sticky notes in a real 3-D space anchored to the screen of the portable computer.

This in-car information system being shown during TechFest uses various forms of input — speech, a graphical user interface, touch and buttons — and state-of-the-art sound capture and processing to provide unparalleled functionality, usability and reliability.

The ubiquity of mobile phones in today’s society enables the capture of multiple videos of the same event, each with a small field of view. This Microsoft Research technology unveiled during TechFest 2009 enables those small videos to be stitched together into one higher-resolution video in real time.

During TechFest 2009, Microsoft Research is displaying a new kind of image feature that can be used for augmented reality.

Family Archive is an interactive, multitouch device to help capture and manage digital and physical memorabilia.

Family Archive is an interactive, multitouch device to help capture and manage digital and physical memorabilia.

Time Card displays a digital record of a person’s activities that can be navigated and sorted in different ways.

Wayve is an appliance that connects people playfully and creatively.

CellFrame is a small wireless display that helps provide social networking capabilities to non-users. Search Proximity Index Buttons (SPIBs) enable users to search playfully through image databases.