[Wired]

…  But Microsoft has an innovative side that’s still capable of producing surprises. In fact, Microsoft spends more than $9 billion a year, and employs tens of thousands of people in research and development alone. While most of that goes toward coding the next versions of the company’s major products, a lot gets funnelled into pure research and cutting-edge engineering.  …

In fact, you only need one hit to make billions of dollars in research pay off, even if you waste the rest of the good ideas. As Malcolm Gladwell argued recently, Xerox, which is often derided for failing to take advantage of a series of amazing inventions at its Palo Alto Research Center, actually saw huge returns from just one invention: the laser printer. Against that, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that Xerox PARC was home to hundreds of useless research projects, or that Xerox never figured out what to do with some of its research, like the graphical user interface.  …

Muscle Movement

…”Skinput” system …  A bracelet of electrodes on your arm senses how you are moving your hand and fingers, and transmits the data wirelessly to your computer, where the game can put it to use. …

Light Space

…  The key to his “Light Space” project is a trio of depth cameras: Cameras that can record 3D data by sensing how far away each point is. A similar sensor is used in Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect, where it helps detect the position and orientation of your body, and can even be used by Kinect hackers to create 3D maps of rooms.  …

When you step inside the cube, the computer recognises your arrival, building a 3D model of your body and of anyone else inside the space.

In Light Space, you can manipulate photos and video windows on a tabletop, just by using your hands. But the 3D aspect of the space means you can do other nifty things: For example, you can swipe a window off the table and onto your hand, where it becomes a little red dot. You can carry this dot around the room — it follows your hand wherever you go — and when you want, you can throw it onto the wall, where it reconstitutes itself as a window. …

The Wedge

… The Wedge is a very carefully engineered piece of acrylic. It is essentially a wide, flat prism. Its angles are computed precisely so that light entering at the narrow end bounces around inside, working its way along towards the thick end, and gradually coming out along the long flat side. In effect, it makes light from the narrow end turn 90 degrees while spreading it out across the face of the plastic. If you place a tiny LCD projector on the narrow end, it can throw a monitor-sized image on the flat surface.  …

Because the wedge works in both directions, it’s possible to create a display that can “see” you at the same time that it’s showing an image. What’s more, the light emitted by a wedge-based display is collimated — the light waves move in parallel lines — so the display can direct a different image to each eye, or a different image to the person sitting next to you. When the team combined eye-tracking technology with collimated light aimed at each eye, they created “the world’s first steerable autostereoscopic 3D display,” as Bathiche calls it. …

Surface 2.0

…

In an ordinary LCD, each pixel is made up of a cluster of sub-pixels, one each for emitting red, green and blue light. In the PixelSense display, each pixel includes a fourth color, infrared, as well as a tiny infrared sensor. IR light emitted by each pixel is reflected back by objects near or on the screen, then picked up by the sensors, which can tell how far away things are by their brightness.

“Your fingertip looks like a comet,” says Microsoft group program manager Pete Kyriacou, who is showing us around a demonstration lab full of Surfaces. Where your finger touches the screen, it’s bright white, but the parts of your finger that are further away fade into darkness. Therefore, Surface’s software can tell which direction you’re pointing.  …

Read the whole story here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/01/microsoft-research?page=2