istartedsomething

What would you do with 20,000 square foot (approx. 1,900 square meter) of real-estate? Would you make the most of it and build a store to sell something? Or would you build a fake store that looks like a real store, functions like a real store, but isn’t actually a store? I’ll give you some time to think about it while I tell you about what Microsoft did.

Rumors of this mystical place has been floating around in the past year or so but just recently Microsoft has published extensive video and photos from the Microsoft Retail Experience Center as part of their vision for a technology-enabled retail experience. It is said the facility is a fully-functional store from real checkouts to a real loading dock, all but lacking one but important thing, real customers.

It’s great Microsoft has the skill to design, build and operate a “real” Microsoft store – which is what everyone has been asking for and doesn’t look half bad I must admit – but it’s a bit of a bummer there’s no apparent way for anyone in the general public to shop there. There’s no phone number, no address and even the emergency exits are painted with a faux-background representing a car-park.

I have just one simple question, if this store is as functional as Microsoft tout it to be, then why not build a car-park, some real doors and just call it “open for business”?

Until then, enjoy the pictures and this virtual Photosynth tour.

If you’ve ever offered technical support to other computer users, you might find yourself losing a slice of your sanity over their inability to describe the problem clearly. And most times it’s not the fault of the user, it’s just difficult to describe what you see with words. A feature new to Windows 7, called “Problem Steps Recorder” looks to be the missing tool for documenting where it all goes wrong.

What the tool is a simple but advanced variation of a screen capture software. Think of it as an automated “Print Screen” plus a little monkey in the background documenting all the mouse clicks, key strokes and gathers some technical reading material, who then ties up everything in a neat box and saves the results. The neat little box you get is a zipped MHTML report page which can be sent off directly to the help desk.

The report page is where this tool really shines. It actually is an XML page documenting each step of the user’s actions complete with a screenshot with the item highlighted. You can view the report as is, or as a slideshow, or even dig into the raw XML to expose greater detail like the X&Y coordinates of the mouse.

Here’s a report I prepared earlier for your viewing pleasure. You must use Internet Explorer to view MHTMLs.

To try the “Problem Steps Recorder” for yourself, type and select “psr.exe” in the Windows 7 start menu.

Microsoft Tags, technically known as High Capacity Color Barcodes, might not be so worthless in print after all. Following yesterday’s announcement at CES 2009, a lot of mostly criticism has arisen over Microsoft’s next-generation 2D barcodes, one of which was its dependency on color. However, my experiments prove it to be not as dependent as you think.

On the surface, what appears to give HCCB’s its technical superiority is color, as the name might suggest. Using different colors, you could store 1 byte of data in less than half the space it would have taken a black-and-white matrix code. But, the secret is not color, at least not in the technical sense.

You see (pun), color is a combination of hue, saturation and brightness. What I’ve found is that the data is not stored in hue or saturation, but brightness alone. Having said that, there is a secondary dependency on color for the technology to work. If that doesn’t make sense, have a look at the following example.

Here is a simple “Hello world” tag I’ve created. On the right, I used Photoshop’s black and white adjustments (settings R:100,Y:100,G:0,C:33,B:0,M:66) to strip out all the hue and saturation information to be left with an image purely composed by differences in brightness.

Now if you took your Tag Reader and tried to capture the black-and-white tag, it won’t work. I don’t know why, but it just wouldn’t. What comes next was stumbled upon by my luck. If you focus your camera on something else in the room, then back to the tag as quickly as possible, it will actually work. (If it doesn’t for you, you’re just going to have to trust me.)

The phenomenon stumbled me at first but soon became rather obvious. Every camera tries to take the perfect photo by automatically adjusting for color balance – the setting which either makes photos look warm or cool. By focusing the camera away, it changes the color balance to suit that area, and if you shift back the camera back really fast, it won’t have time to readjust the color balance and so it inaccurately tints the otherwise black-and-white tag with either a orange or blue hue.

With that in mind, it means that all you need is a single hue of color (monochrome) to make it work. Try these. It should work every time.

Sure, it still means that HCCBs don’t work in a pure black-and-white situation like a newspaper but I don’t think in this day and age single-color printing is too much to ask for.

Update: Even subtle gradients and photo-based backgrounds will work too.

It just wouldn’t be right if Microsoft didn’t have its own barcode technology too, which is why today Microsoft Tag (Beta) was announced at CES 2009. Much like other 2D barcode technologies including the popular but underwhelming QR Code, Microsoft Tag allows data to be stored in a graphical bitmap using shapes and colors. But with a twist.

If you were to assume Microsoft Tag is just a clone of QR Code, you’d be wrong. In fact you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking about it. Microsoft Tag is based on a whole new technology called High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCBs), which was invented in-house by Microsoft Research. The difference is not using square pixels, but triangle shapes and colors to store data. The following diagrams show off its advantages.

Unlike other tag technologies too, the Microsoft Tags don’t actually store the information. You see, all it stores is a unique ID which it then sends to Microsoft’s servers. This way, you can include much more information, and more variety of information, then if it was just on the tag itself. A nice side-effect of this is also the ability for publishers to gather reporting data on how many times it was seen.

To read these tags, Microsoft is making available today a downloadable application to a handful of mobile platforms including Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry, and Symbian S60 phones. A camera and internet connection is obviously required. To get the application, point your phone’s browser to http://gettag.mobi.

I’ve only played with Microsoft Tag for a few minutes on my Windows Mobile phone, but its a noticeably better experience than I’ve had with other 2D barcodes in the past. For example you can read it from a very far distance, from a very side angle and even if it’s partially blocked.

In addition, it wouldn’t just be a Microsoft platform without developer tools. That is why starting today the “tag maker” service is also available so anyone can create these tags. For the moment this is a free service, but out of beta, one could potentially see this is where Microsoft plans to make a buck.

I created a few tags of my own so you can try it out.

Update: Microsoft Tags work in monochrome too, unofficially.

There was one thing left out of Microsoft’s CES 2009 keynote today and that was the announcement of Songsmith, by Microsoft Research.

Religious followers of this blog would know that Songsmith is the product of a Microsoft Research project with a student from the University of Washington called MySong which was showed off in early 2008. The software can automatically provide musical melodies to accompany any vocal singing you provide, making anyone audible a potential songwriter. Not that every teenager should be one.

Songsmith seems to have matured quite a bit from its early prototype days with new features such as “(allowing) you to expand your collection of musical styles and instruments through our partners, PG Music and Garritan” and “enables you to edit chords to create the perfect music accompaniment, even if you’ve never worked with chords before.”

As the second product to ship (first being AutoCollage) by the previously research-only-but-increasingly-commercial Microsoft Research (as the name suggests), Songsmith will only be available (soon) via the Microsoft Store as a digital download. A trial will also be available. Prices are not yet announced.

Update: The official Songsmith website is now up. So is the trial download link. The price for the full version if US$29.95.

If you thought you had too much free time, think again. Much to the frustration of many, remote controls have a tendency to feature very small buttons. So when “michbex” saw a super-sized Brookstone remote control at a shopping mall, he knew he had to do one better.

A true geek at heart, “michbex” and his partner-in-crime bought two Playstation 2 Dance Dance Revolution mats, a PS2-to-PC converter box, wrote a C# .NET library to interface with the mats and some more code to send appropriate keystrokes to Windows Media Center. (All of the source code is available from his site for download.) The result, is a Windows Media Center remote control fit for the Hulk.

To quote “michbex” himself, “What comes after multi-touch? Why not multi-step? Let’s see if this is the first STEP towards an incredible UX-paradigm-shift.” Classic.