TechVirtuoso

Natural User Interface & Microsoft Research

January 7th, 2010 at 1:11 PM  1 Comment

The QWERTY keyboard and the mouse have been the primary methods of interaction with computers for a long time. But there is a group at Microsoft seeking to make that a thing of the past. Enter the team at Microsoft Research.

Larry Larsen over at Microsoft’s Channel 9 has a great interview with Bill Buxton, one of the Principle Researchers at MSR and the author of Sketching User Interfaces. It talks about their work with what Microsoft has dubbed “Natural User Interface” and how the multi-touch technologies in products like the Apple iPhone and Windows 7 will eventually become a regular part of computing, as well as new technologies like those in the Xbox 360 Project Natal.


Get Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft CES keynote fails to excite

January 7th, 2010 at 8:28 AM  No Comments

If you couldn’t get a chance to watch the Microsoft CES pre-show keynote last night, you didn’t miss much. If you were actually at the event, I feel sorry for you, it must have been hard to stay awake.

After starting late due to power issues (which fried one of the Microsoft demo units on stage) the keynote got off to a rather boring start with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, giving various statistics about how well recently released products like Windows 7 and Bing are doing. For the first half hour, the audio stream for the webcast was so bad, it kept cutting out and then required constant volume adjustment. Note to Microsoft, hire a decent sound engineer next time.

If you’d like to watch the keynote for yourself, you can see the saved version on the Microsoft website.

It was all pretty much downhill from there. The much discussed “Courier” tablet that many in the tech press was excited they would announce never came, and there were no details about Windows Mobile 7… at all. Only “we’ll have more about mobile at Mobile World Congress.” So overall, the keynote failed to deliver much of anything that we didn’t know or have not seen already. But, here is a breakdown of what was covered, after the break.

(more…)