Microsoft Home and CIW of the Future

Earlier this month I enjoyed another great trip to Seattle (pics) for Microsoft Sharepoint Conference 2008. The conference was really beneficial to our progress at work in leveraging Sharepoint for our intranet, collaboration, and data management to the extent possible. After the conference we were privileged to visit Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft's headquarters. There, in Building 33 -- better known as the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center -- Chris and I were invited to visit the Microsoft Home of the Future and the Center for Information Work.

Microsoft Home of the Future
I enjoyed this tour more than the CIW, personally. It starts in an Asian-style entry way where when the doorbell rings the homeowner's cell phone chirps with an image of the visitor. The owner can then choose options to ask the visitor to leave a message or even unlock the door remotely. Once inside, the house -- "Grace" -- tells where the members of the family are, the weather and a few reminders. "Grace" presents herself visually using OLED technology, hidden behind the painted wall. We saw pervasive use of RFID tags in place of today's more common UPC labels. The RFID technology allows for items -- decorations, greeting cards, anything -- to be tagged with meta-data. The house 'knows' what items are on the kitchen counter, what ingredients are missing from the recipe that's being projected onto the counter. The dining room can be redecorated on the fly for the child's party -- changing wall projections, and even projecting interactive placemats on the table that the kids can play with. There's way too much to mention here, but wildly entertaining.

Microsoft Center for Information Work
Still impressive was the CIW. In this room there were a multitude of workstations. Some had what appeared to be three 20" projection screens, some were tablets, many flat panels, and even haptic-based input panels (aka multi-touch). We saw voicemails converted to text on the fly and placed into your Inbox with emails, meetings, and more -- with the system able to filter out what you don't want or what is lower priority. Advanced videoconferencing was shown with Microsoft's Roundtable device, along with Office Communication Server to demonstrate the ability to be "seated" across from a panel of speakers even in a standard office environment setting.

Seadragon + Photosynth = Uber Cool

I recently shared the following video with a colleague and we both agree it ROCKS. The video, from TED in March 2007, demonstrates Seadragon technology. Seadragon centers around a concept that you only need to render on screen at the screen's resolution. In doing so you can view photos at hundreds of megapixels and continuously zoom in to an almost infinite level. Imagine this -- being able to open your newspaper and the period at the end of a sentence contains the complete text of a book you want to read and the first letter on the first page of that book can be zoomed to reveal hidden secrets about the story. Yeah. You'll then see Photosynth which contains Seadragon technology. Photosynth lets you view a 3D environment from almost any angle, made from 2D images -- such as all public images from Flickr tagged with "Times Square". Very, very cool. Enjoy...