istartedsomething

What the Oscars or Cannes is for great movies, TED is for great ideas and great technologies. The latest presentation recording uploaded to TED Talks this week also happens to be a Microsoft one from March 2007. Stephen Lawler, general manager of the Virtual Earth team gave a sneak peek into what goes on behind the silk-screen doors at the labs.

Before you click play on the video below, I want to give you a heads up on the boring bits before you fall right asleep. Unfortunately for the first whole 2 minutes of the presentation, Stephen is in marketing-mode, explaining much of what we already know about Virtual Earth and common sense – more computing power, better experiences. If you’re short on time, you want to start at about 2:10, where it’s all ‘insider peeks’ from then on.

Where Stephen really kicks it up a notch is from 4:20, showing off how they translate images from a moving vehicle into 3D models without any user input whatsoever. Building 3D models with simply sequential photographs from a car, not lasers, not scanners, pure digital pixels is just mind-blowing. And not for the buildings on the side of the road, I can see models constructed way out into the distance.

What’s “cute view” you might ask? I’m sure the technical name is something much more professional, but it’s what I’m going to call it. Demoed at approximately 5:05, he loads up a video showcasing a new method of browsing Virtual Earth. It uses the same street imagery and 3D model data, but transforms it into a spherical view where the land is represented by a sphere and you are in the center. Buildings are shown as exaggerated objects that fly out into space. Kind of like those cartoons where a building is exaggerated so high, it extrudes out of the atmosphere and into space. A very fun and ‘cute’ alternative.

I’m not exactly sure what exactly is his last demo about, but it has to do with 3D models and the birds-eye imagery they have. From what I can understand, they can generate some neat composites that takes the best features of each and generates something much better looking.

It just goes to show Virtual Earth is not dead, and they still have plenty of tricks up its very long and PR-tight sleeve. Just by looking at the number of links on the left (local links on his own computer, I checked), there are still a lot of prototypes and demonstrations yet to be shown publically. Hopefully Stephen will speak again at another conference sooner than later and share some of those other internal nuggets.

A crapload of patents applications from Microsoft were processed today. There was one in particular that caught my attention, titled “Interactive job channel“. They say Microsoft has the brightest minds in the industry, and this is definite proof. These smart minds have combined two of life’s great necessities, finding a job and the television into one mind-boggling combination. Kiss your death MTV!

Anyway, I decided to dig deeper into this extraordinary invention, checking out some of their accompanied illustrations to find out how such a system would work and what it might look like. But I uncovered something more bizarre. Penguins roaming the city parks to be exact.

Could you imagine the conversation taken place between the patent inventors and illustration artist?

Inventor:	Hey.
Artist:	Hey. What do you need drawn?
Inventor:	Oh the usual. Just some office buildings would be good. Put a few trees in. Somewhere to sit, say a park bench or something. And some people.
Artist:	Screw you, I’m putting in penguins! Kickass.

Unfortunately neither an interactive job channel or street-roaming penguins has taken the world by storm. However when the time is right, I for one welcome our new fluffy overlords.

AMD’s recent high-velocity Phenom logo exhibition on the side of speeding Formula One helmet might have been a little anti-dramatic, if anything the size and fidelity of a 4 inch sticker was a little disappointing. However, thank god to the magic of Andre Fedosjeenko and Photoshop, in that order, he’s been able to recreate the AMD logo is (super) high resolution for all of us to appreciate the beauty of the blue comet or something or rather.

Can’t wait for AMD’s insightful PR team to tell us what it actually means, because some of us don’t get it.

Some of you might remember the post(s) I wrote last week about the movie “The Island”, in which I claimed the interactive touch desk in Dr. Merrick’s office was actually an early protoype of the Microsoft Surface. As it turns out, it was not a Microsoft Surface. When in fact, it was just good film making and the hard work by many talented designers. However, there is still a tiny Surface connection. Here is the explanation.

Yesterday, I had received an email from Mark Coleran about my blog post on the subject which provided a definite statement on whether or not in fact it was a “Surface”. For those of you not familiar with Mark’s work, he is an amazing visual designer for on-screen production. It is almost guaranteed you’ve seen some of his work in over a dozen movies including “The World is Not Enough“, “Lara Croft” and obviously “The Island“. Check out his showreel for an overview.

Mark carefully explains the story about Microsoft’s involvement in “The Island”.

Lots of companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Dell etc, regularly place product or branding within movies. In the majority of cases it helps offset the massive outlay required to equip scenes and can be very helpful in production. In the particular case of the Island, there were numerous companies involved. Microsoft were involved and the primary part of that involvement was for a information kiosk. I think they also had some background scene branding as well.

When companies get involved, they make a lot of suggestions about how and where, their products are featured. For the most part it is reasonable and sensible. They want to have their stuff seen in the best light possible. It is rare indeed if they get to have any creative involvement, and in this particular case, they did not.

The desk scene in The Island, was inspired in part by Minority Report. So much so they contracted the same science and technology advisor, John Underkoffler from M.I.T. to oversee the futurism. Mr Underkofflers’ involvement is ensure that what is done is believable in some sense, so makes suggestions based on what he is aware of in research.

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The word of 2007 is “multi-touch“. It’s everywhere, from the iPhone to the Microsoft Surface. We weren’t happy with just one finger on the touch-sensitive screens, we wanted to put all 10 fingers and probably some toes on too, and multi-touch was born.

One of the most memorable and widespread demonstrations of multi-touch technology is probably the TED presentation by Jeff Han in 2006. I don’t know exactly why but his prototype has become the benchmark for multi-touch technologies. However if I recall correctly, the iPhone is the only portable device that could achieve the desired effect without the bulky equipment required in many other setup such as the Surface. But the fallback being skin-sensitive only, an issue to those with big hands who wants to use their nails or disabilities.

The idea of having a multi-touch-capable laptop sounds pretty sweet, but of course no one would want to carry a cathode-ray-tube in their backpack, so how do you come up with a solution for a screen less than an inch thick? Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Steve Hodges might have the answer.

Steve’s solution is remarkably simple yet effective. With an off-the-shelf laptop, he retrofitted some infrared sensors on the back and together with the magic of software, you have multi-touch! Check out the following video clip (excerpt from MSR Cambridge video) to see his demonstration. It has all the dragging and pinching demos you’d expect to see in every multi-touch display, so don’t expect to be blown away.

Granted the sensors are a little thick at the moment and only affect a portion of the screen, but it’s dead simple and presumably just as cheap. Obviously with some more work on the production and aesthetics side of things (no one wants a hole in the back of their screen), this could become a mainstream solution.

In addition, because he uses infrared technology, an added enhancement is the ability to pick up infrared signals from a standard remote. There’s nothing exactly new about remotes and laptops, several on the market already use built-in remotes for media browsing activities. However again, this could drive the technology mainstream and spark a whole wave of do-it-yourself infrared hacks for computers.

Having said all that, the rate at which Microsoft Research projects are realized is not exactly fast or even promising for that matter. I hope this one picks up some pace and interest from computer manufacturers so all of us can twist and pinch pictures on our laptops in the near future.

The AMD PR team certainly has their priorities right when a photo gallery ignores much of the thrill and spill of formula one racing, and instead focus on a little sticker promoting AMD’s new processor brand on the side of a racing helmet. Credits to the Daniel and Matt at the Neowin forums for spotting a rather strange yet suspiciously accurate heading on one of AMD’s latest photo galleries from their F1 racing team, it reads “AMD Phenom™ Appears on Ferrari Formula One Helmets“.

Perhaps this is why AMD is pouring millions of sponsorship money into motor racing, so they can get their 4 by 2 inch sticker on the side of a helmet moving at an excess of over 200km/h. Regardless, at least they’ve made the enthusiast’s and my job much easier by pointing it out. I suspect if no one paid any attention to that, they might have initiated Plan B. I’ve created an artistic rendition of what that might have looked like.

So there you have it, the Phenom logo is a purpleish-blue comet swinging by computer stores in Q1 2008.