Microsoft Research & Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero is awesome (and Rockband-don’t worry!) and Microsoft Research are pretty great too. So what happens when you put the two together? I’ll tell you…playing Guitar Hero without a controller!

This would definitely reduce the amount of space that all the guitars take up, and make it easier to carry them around (should you wish). They also show the technology being used to control an MP3 player whilst out jogging…just move a finger to skip, pause, play etc…something that would definitely take off

Again, more great work from Microsoft Research

Microsoft Total Recall

This is a great piece on the work going on inside Microsoft Research called MyLifeBits. Gordon Bell and his colleague Jim Gemmell have been working to digitally record nearly everything that goes in in Gordon’s life…and make it a useful data repository. As Graham said:

“I was saving everything, but it became clear that the problem was a search problem. You could save everything…but the big problem was organizing and then searching…”

They created a database to store all this data and then wrote software to collect, scan and label all the things captured, which include emails, pictures, phone calls, web pages visited, documents, scanned receipts and more!

A real life example:

“If I’ve ever seen a Web page, I’ve got a copy of it, and I can find it again quickly because I only have to search my own corpus, not the entire Web.”

That sounds pretty great to me The number of times that I know I’ve seen something on a site and I either can’t remember which one, or I get the right site but just can’t find the page is crazy…and this’d be a good way to sort that out. Not sure about storing EVERY web page though you know

This work is a great example not just of what Microsoft Research get up to, but also a great example of what IT in general can do for the world. 10-15 years down the line when MyLifeBits is commonplace-finding information will be so much easier!

Check out the full article over at MS Research here.

Office 2010 Background removal

The new background removal tool in Office 2010 is fantastic!

I hadn’t played around with it before but I just saw a tweet about some of the technology inside it, and my interest was piqued! This new ability is inside Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook and helps bring out the part of the picture that you actually want to use in your document. It’s pretty clever, methinks a demo is needed:

Original Picture:

Insert the picture into Word (in this example) and hit the “Background Removal” button:

Which brings up the “marquee”:

The rectangle can be moved, stretched and extended to cover the exact area you need and then it cuts away all the background to give you:

That is pretty amazing how it’s taken out the sea etc in the background but there are a few issues…there’s that patch under it’s flipper that’s still there and you might notice that he’s now missing his tail!

That isn’t the end of it though, there are a couple of extra tools that enable you to correct the above:

With these you can mark specific areas to be included/removed despite what the algorithm might suggest

You can see the markers on it’s flipper and the tail and now the picture looks like this:

Perfectly formed turtle with none of the background…nice

I did however discover that simply tightening up the rectangle in the original picture caused the missing/extra bits of picture to correct themselves!

This is a great addition and some really clever work from Microsoft Research-well done guys!!!

You can see the original MS post here.

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2008

I was a regular watcher of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in years gone by, but have found the last few years to be somewhat lacklustre. I’d still watch them but always feel a little short changed

This year (2008) is much better though, this year’s lectures are all about computers and are being delivered by Prof. Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research in Cambridge! I know I’m a couple of days late with this post but my Sky+ has been playing up so today was my first chance to once them, and they’re definitely worth the wait. Today’s (Wednesday) lecture contained a great explanation of Binary counting which I think will be used as a reference base for a lot of people as it was very concise and easy to understand.

The 2nd episode (that was shown on Tuesday night) contains some great demo’s of some of the wonderful technology that MS Research have been/are creating including Surface and the Roundtable. It was great to hear the sounds of wonder and awe as the kids present saw what the Surface table was capable of…and I have to say I was pretty impressed by the Video puzzle as well!

MS Surface Video Puzzle

 This next picture shows the 360-degree panoramic view of the Roundtable displayed on Microsoft’s spherical display. It looks much cooler in the video as Prof. Bishop scrolls the panorama around the sphere!

Roundtable on a Sphere

 Other posts on the Roundtable can be found here.

For anyone that has missed the lectures and/or simply wants to re-watch them, they are now available an DemandFive completely free.

Microsoft SecondLight

The Microsoft SecondLight device is seriously cool…it’s like the Surface…but even better!

It’s quite hard to explain in words what it does without making it sound rubbish and/or pointless. It can display one image on the table and then another image through that which is viewable through paper placed on the table..if that doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry…but the picture below show’s what I mean. The Surface is displaying the pic of the car and then you can also see the blueprint..

A cool video demo can be seen here (warning: Will open in Windows Media Player)

I saw this through a combination of Gizmodo & PCPro..