Wayve
Wayve – a messaging device based on the idea of a digital sticky note
Wayve supports creative and playful messaging amongst users ranging from young children to grandparents. Messages can be created by typing, scribbling, or taking photos. These can be sent to mobile phones, PCs, or other Wayves. In a field trial of UK households, Wayve-to-Wayve messaging was found to dominate use, with remote family members connecting with one another by scribbling on photos, playing simple games and drawing each other pictures.
Lecture Room 1
weConnect
weConnect is an online service that enables mobile and desktop users to connect via exclusive and personal media channels. A person can easily create a media mix using images, text, and animations and broadcast the content to another person though a dedicated channel. The recipient can view the content live and retrospectively on the mobile or desktop. Connected with other services such as Amazon.com, weConnect enables users to compile a list of items they may like to purchase or recommend to others. As a research platform, weConnect enabled us to explore the effects of rich media broadcast among individuals in close relationships and social circles.
Recital Room
SecondLight
SecondLight – Bringing User Interfaces into the real world
SecondLight is a new surface-computing technology that can project images and detect gestures “in mid-air” above the display, in addition to supporting multi-touch interactions on the surface.
It works by using an electrically switchable liquid-crystal diffuser as the rear projection display surface. This material is continually toggled between diffuse and clear states, so quickly that the switching is imperceptible. When it is diffuse, the system behaves like a regular surface computer, but when clear, it is possible to project into and image the area above the display surface. This enables magical new forms of interaction in which the user interface is no longer bound to the display surface, but becomes part of the real world.
Lecture Room 1
TellTable
TellTable: Creative Storytelling on an Interactive Tabletop
TellTable builds on Microsoft Surface to provide an interactive storytelling experience, similar to how children tell stories using physical toys. Children can create any digital characters and scenarios they think of, by taking photos of real world objects, people, and environments, or by finger painting. Using multi-touch gestures to manipulate these, children can act, narrate, and record imaginative stories together, and replay the stories later to share with their friends.
The system was deployed in a primary school, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Teachers were particularly enthusiastic about its potential as an educational tool; to help children develop communication skills, and to create interactive tutorials for teaching foreign languages.
Lecture Room 1
Dragonfly
Dragonfly is a set of electronic building blocks that allows you to quickly invent, design and build small computing devices, such as digital cameras or MP3 players. Different building blocks – which include things like buttons, sensors, connectors and displays – can be easily combined and programmed using the C# programming language.
Lecture Room 1
Time Card
Time Card – providing a navigable digital record of the past that can be crafted into a lasting memorial or epitaph of our own or others’ lives.
Time Card is a device for the home designed to display a digital record, akin to a time line, of a single person’s activities, that incorporates digital media of a variety of types and which puts that record in an appropriate context. The data stream can be navigated and sorted in various ways that highlight different renderings of a person’s past. Time Cards are network enabled devices, the size of smart-phones, designed to be a ‘mantle-piece’ device and are interacted with through touch sensitive screens.
Lecture Room 1
The X Factor: building games for the Xbox 360
with XNA?
If you have ever wanted to make your own video games, Microsoft® XNA™ Game Studio is for you. Anybody can create and share great games with XNA Game Studio – and even play them on your Xbox 360!
Recital Room
TrueSkill in Halo 3
TrueSkill is a Bayesian rating and matchmaking system specifically designed to work in the world of online multi-player video games and Xbox Live. TrueSkill receives match outcomes of online games and estimates the skills of the players involved to enable skill based matchmaking for challenging and fair matches. The demo shows TrueSkill at work in the blockbuster title Halo 3 including game mode selection, skill display and histogram, matchmaking process, and game outcome. The demo is highly interactive and compelling because it demonstrates TrueSkill in the real world of online gaming and in conjunction with one of the most successful titles in history.
Recital Room
Mobile Content Casting and Social Exchange: Codename Oxygen (oX)
The demo Codename Oxygen (oX) – is a mobile phone program to exchange pictures, videos, music, texts and files when phones pass nearby each other but don’t always have a good or fast connection to the Internet. Ox uses awareness of your social network to intelligently exchange files that you or your friends are interested in whilst trying to balance downloading and uploading files in a timely fashion. Our example application is photo sharing within Facebook™ but it is equally applicable to music sharing or blogging.
Recital Room
Check your units!
Mix-ups involving units-of-measure can have disastrous consequences: ten years ago a NASA spacecraft crashed into the surface of the planet Mars because of a confusion between pounds and newtons. Microsoft’s new programming language F# makes life easier by detecting unit errors before disaster strikes!
Recital Room
Proving that programs eventually do something good
Proving that programs eventually do something good
We will demo two tools that automatically check that software cannot hang or crash: SLAyer proves memory safety of programs that manually manipulate pointers over data structures like cyclic doubly linked lists; TERMINATOR is a termination checker.
These tools are advanced prototypes and are intended to be run on industrial software components (like Windows device drivers) of 10,000s of lines of code.
Recital Room
Connect with AI
Connect with AI is an interactive demo that can autonomously play a game of Connect4 against a human opponent. At its heart is a vision (camera) processing algorithm to sense the state of the game and an Artificial Intelligence based reasoning engine (using alpha-beta pruning with multi-step look ahead) that decides on the next best move. Crucially, a 5-DOF robotic arm is programmed to implement the machine’s moves, i.e., to reach for the piece and place it in the right slot as dictated by the AI. Come and try your mettle against it!
Recital Room
A new model of the global carbon-climate system
The carbon emissions that humans have already emitted, have already affected global climate. But to head off dangerous future climate change, we need to predict future global CO2 concentrations under different ‘scenarios’ (e.g. business-as-usual, where humans carry on regardless), then predict the impact of these CO2 levels on future climate. At Microsoft Research Cambridge, we have just built a new simulation model that makes these kinds of predictions. Come and see the model, and hear about how we built it.
Recital Room
The magic of computer science
Learn some clever conjuring tricks and try to work out how they are done. Then discover how the same techniques that make the ‘magic’ work are responsible for some of the most interesting computer science applications around.
Recital Room
