Microsoft shares another glimpse of the future, but you still can’t have it

At TechFair 2013 in Washington D.C., Microsoft showed off an abundance of high-tech projects; the company states that the technology being designed by its research division, allows a glimpse into the future of technology. World class scientists working on the Redmond campus showed off how they could be an asset to some of society’s biggest challenges.

Fred Humphries, Microsoft VP of U.S. Government Affairs, stated that:

“At Microsoft, investing in research and development are top priorities as we continue to spark American innovation while creating the jobs and technologies of the future… From pushing the boundaries of computing beyond the screen to helping make sense of large-scale data sets for scientific discoveries, we’re excited to share the latest innovations from Microsoft Research with the D.C. community at TechFair.”

Take a look below for some of the technologies Microsoft flaunted:

Automated Problem Generation for Education: Microsoft’s Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) showed off the benefits of Computer-aided education. The system can generate a personalized workflow to help students with problem solving. The system is able to help with logic problems, sentence completion, procedural mathematics, algebraic proofs, and more. Click here to learn more.

Kinect Fusion: Research techniques for quickly and affordably recreating accurate 3D renderings of people and objects. The system takes advantage of a six depth of field position from a depth sensing camera, such as Microsoft’s Kinect. Click here to learn more.

Project “GeoFlow” for Excel: GeoFlow is an Excel plugin that allows a 3D visual representation of data that can then be shared with others. This project is the only one available for download; you can grab the preview here (Excel 2013 required).

Real-Time, 3D Scene Capture and Reconstruction: Another project devoted to creating 3D renderings, this one captures several color images to build a high resolution “voxelization” of the surface. The project takes advantage of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to power the process. Click here to learn more.

SandDance: A web based information visualization system that uses 3D hardware acceleration to “explore relationships between hundreds of thousands of items”.  SandDance focuses on natural user interaction techniques such as touch screens and Kinect. Click here to learn more.

ViralSearch: Microsoft wants to be able to track the latest hits and newest meme. ViralSearch is an attempt to look at large quantities of data and decide what may be “going viral”. Click here to learn more.

SketchInsight: An interactive whiteboard for “storytelling” that uses data in real time. Simply sketch a chart and it will be auto populated with relevant data. (This is one of my favorite, so check out the video) Click here to learn more.

Please note: If you are using our Windows Phone Central App, there is no Silverlight support on the platform and you will not be able to view the videos. Sorry. =/

Sources: The Fire House, Microsoft Research Blog