Posts tagged Microsoft
Microsoft Courier
Mar 8th
So with all this hype of Apple’s iPad, Microsoft has been developing a similar device that’s going to be more ‘journal-like’. The link to the Engadget article is here. They have various demos of the product ‘working’ or what it will be like. The interface is multi-touch driven and is based around using a pen, basic premise to make it like a digital moleskin. It’s launch date is supposed to be this year sometime.
I think it’s quite interesting. Microsoft keeps trying to fight Apple’s consumer touch device. Also, watching the videos, Microsoft seems to be designing with designers or the typical Apple-cult followers with their new device. Check it out, quite neat.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft)
Feb 17th
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ background is as multidimensional as the visions he helps create. In the 1990s, he authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg’s role as the father of movable type.
He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.