Microsoft tantalises with TechFest demos

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 08 March 2007 08:32

Business IT - Technology

HD View provides a way of efficiently displaying large (even gigapixel) images over the web, sending only enough pixels to display them at the current zoom factor. The images can be constructed by stitching together smaller shots (much as photographers create panoramic views), but it isn't mandatory that all the components are taken from the same spot

Locate Me allows someone with a camera phone to find out where they are by snapping a nearby building and sending it to a server which returns a map of the location. Commercialising this would require huge databases of street-level photography for each city serviced - think of A9's attempt at local search but in reverse. 

Mix is a technology for combining data from multiple local and remote  sources (files, databases, web sites, etc) into a single sharable document - think Wiki, but with the addition of automated data feeds.

Personal Audio Space uses an array of speakers to generate sound that's audible only within an area a few metres wide. It sounds great for open-plan offices and shared living spaces: you can hear the music or video soundtrack while the person in the next cube or at the other end of the room enjoys peace and quiet.

Query Projections graphs the relationship between the links generated by a search engine with a view to improving the relevance of those results.

World-Wide Telescope provides a convenient view of the millions of astronomical images already collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - think Google Earth or MSN Virtual Earth, but looking up rather than down.