The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Another interesting and unexpected development is in the area of computer science and medicine, which we briefly touched on before. Here, Microsoft’s David Huckerman has “taken the attributes of a spam filter and applied that to how HIV mutates and works” with the goal of “looking at a way to create a [future] customised vaccine for each person”.
Yet another project is on “how to make everything virtual” with no physical mouse or keyboard, with “multiple desktops in Z dimension space to rotate through, with no screens sitting on walls but screens instead integrated into glass”, something seen in that aforementioned 2019 vision video.
There’s also work being done on software networking radios, gigabit wireless, white spaces networking (which uses existing analog TV spectrum, a wireless frequency that easily goes through walls), indoor GPS for in-building navigation, and augmented reality (something also seen in that 2019 video!).
And, while Microsoft has already previously announced work on robotics, Fawcett has some of his 850 R&D people working on a personal flying robot, something already in existence as a prototype in China, which will be a personal companion, able to record parts of your life you want recorded, able to project images onto a wall and even use multi-touch Surface PC elements on those projected images.
Work on a “universal translator” able to instantly translate between English and Spanish as two people converse on their mobile phones has also been done, with a laptop PC in the middle doing the translating.
While the system worked in the lab, it also crashed the PC after a while, so while much more work is yet to be done, instant and accurate universal translation, along with natural sounding computer voice pronunciation means that the elimination of the language barrier is something we’ll all one day enjoy just as we’ve seen in sci-fi stories.
There’ll be more to report on all of this once the “locknote” with Phil Fawcett occurs in a few hours time, with an article on other Tech Ed interviews I conducted to come. See you then!
Disclosure: Alex Zaharov-Reutt is attending Microsoft Tech Ed 2009 as a guest of Microsoft.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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