By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research How can you achieve the impossible? Easy—as long as you have the right people and the right tools. The Terapixel project from Microsoft Research Redmond is proof positive. The effort—to create the largest, seamless spherical image ever made…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research With its New Orleans location and a schedule that includes team competitions, an animation festival, musical performances, and a gallery of interactive art, the 36th annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies (SIGGRAPH 2009) might…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Brunelleschi resound through history as two of the guiding lights of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, of course, gifted us with the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but he also excelled at mathematics,…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Bill Buxton is a man of many interests: composer, musician, outdoorsman. Most of all, though, he is a relentless advocate for innovative product design. “Ultimately,” he says, “we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Zhengyou Zhang has a vision: to bring people together. He also has a strategy to achieve that vision: by utilizing multimedia technology. His latest tactic to reach the goal is the Personal Telepresence Station. That’s the name of…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Asia, celebrating its 10th anniversary, recently presented its annual Computing in the 21st Century academic symposium, held over two days, Nov. 4 in Beijing and Nov. 7 in Singapore. For the second consecutive year, Baining Guo,…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’ve got photos—lots and lots of photos. Everybody does these days, thanks to the digital-photography revolution. Hundreds, thousands, a veritable treasure trove of image-based memories. Sometimes, though, you don’t need thousands of photos. Sometimes, you just need that…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In these days of nearly ubiquitous access to digital cameras, and the consequent explosion of images available via the Internet, it has become more important than ever to find ways to render those images efficiently. Unfortunately, the complex…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Life, a great man once said, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. And sometimes, it appears, so is art. Three members of Microsoft Research can attest to that. The three, based on different continents and…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research It’s fair to assume that anyone who knows anything about the Web—anyone reading these words—is comfortably familiar with text search. It has become perhaps the pre-eminent way to extract information from the Internet, and it is extremely simple…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Kids of all ages love cartoons. They appeal because of their vivid colors, their fluid motion, their whimsical world view, their idealized parallel universe. In a cartoon, a coyote that falls off a cliff and gets flattened by…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Have you seen the one about …? From time immemorial, mankind has maximized its ability to share information orally. Whether it is passing along a recounting of a movie, recapping last night’s sporting event, or simply telling a…
