Wednesday, 26 November 2008 10:01 AM
Click
here to view the original article at cnet news.
Microsoft hopes 'Milan' table PC has magic touch
At first glance, Microsoft's secret project looks like a 2007 version of the sit-down arcade game Ms. Pac Man.
But if this machine were running the game, you could just take your finger and flick away the monsters chasing the heroine.
Microsoft on Wednesday is taking the wraps off "Milan," more than five years in the making and the first in what the company hopes will be a long line of "surface computers." The Microsoft Surface tabletop PC, for which the company has created both the hardware and software, offers shades of the technology seen in the sci-fi thriller Minority Report. The whole unit is controlled entirely through touch; there's no mouse or keyboard.
To paint, people can pick up a paint brush or just dip their fingers in virtual paint cups. Sharing photos is similarly intuitive. A stack of pictures can be easily sorted through and shared. To resize a photo, just stretch two fingers apart. Pivot the fingers and the image rotates. More than one person can be interacting with the computer at a time.
"It's very approachable," said Pete Thompson, the former T-Mobile executive who runs Microsoft's surface-computing business. "You just want to touch it."
Although consumers will be able to touch it later this year, most won't be able to buy a surface computer any time soon.
The expensive components required to allow multiple users to touch the device simultaneously give it a price tag approaching $10,000. As a result, Microsoft isn't targeting homes initially, though it hopes consumers can own their own Milan within three to five years. For now, Microsoft is focusing on getting the products into public spaces in the hospitality arena--hotel lobbies, restaurants, and casinos, to name a few.
The company's initial customers are cellular carrier T-Mobile, which will use the units in its retail stores; hotel operator Starwood, which owns brands including Sheraton and Westin; casino owner Harrah's and slot game maker IGT. Each of the initial partners should have a few initial machines up and running around November, Thompson said.
Thompson said the roll-out approach is similar to that taken by the tech industry with plasma displays, which were used in trade show booths for years while they were still too costly for the home.
Sheraton Vice President Hoyt Harper said Microsoft's tactic is pretty savvy, noting that many guests who might see the product in a Sheraton lobby could easily be among those who will buy one when it finally does go on sale widely. "I think that's one reason they chose us," he said.
Harper said the computers fit perfectly into his company's efforts to turn its hotel lobbies into destinations rather than merely places people stop on their way somewhere else. That, he said, makes them easily worth their high price tag.
"How can you not take advantage of something that could materially change the guest experience in the lobby?" Harper asked. Initially, Sheraton plans to have three Milan machines at hotels in New York, Boston and Chicago, with two in each lobby and one in the club lounge. If that means folks are lining up, he said, all the better.
"It will be a nice problem to have," he said.
Another consideration, in addition to cost, is how well Milan holds up to wear and tear. Harrah's CIO Tim Stanley wants to make sure the machines are built to last before he starts placing them in casinos on the Vegas strip.
If he puts one in the Pure nightclub, for example, "they might dance on (the) table," he said. "Can it handle that?"
At its core, Milan is powered by a fairly standard high-end Vista PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card, 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2GB of memory. To make the touch screen work, Microsoft crams a lot of other stuff into its tabletop unit. Underneath the roughly textured scratch-proof and spill-proof surface covering the top of the unit, five infrared cameras sense fingers or other objects touching the surface, while a DLP projector turned on its side generates the screen image people see.
To show off the technology to the public, Microsoft has written a few demo applications, such as the paint and photo apps, as well as a program in which specially tagged clear tiles make up a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of a still image, however, the tiles are part of a moving video (it's harder than it sounds to put together).
But Microsoft has hooked up its partners with a handful of software companies it has certified to write Milan-compatible programs. The company isn't making the technology widely available to developers, though it may do so down the road.
Microsoft is not alone in the arena of multitouch computing. NYU professor Jeff Han wowed the crowd at the March TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference with a similar technology and has launched a start-up, Perceptive Pixel, to commercialize it. Apple has also gotten patents in the area and has talked about the use of multitouch in its upcoming iPhone.
Still, Thompson said he isn't worried about infringing anyone else's technology.
"Our legal team feels really good about our IP situation," Thompson said.
The Milan effort began during a series of conversations between Microsoft researcher Andy Wilson and hardware designer Steve Bathiche. The team presented the idea in 2003 to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and started working on prototypes.
Microsoft itself has launched other ventures in this area, largely through Microsoft Research, which has been demonstrating projects in this realm for years. It even licensed a derivative of the touch technology to a medical-imaging company last year. Another version, dubbed PlayAnywhere, is a mobile take on surface computing, using a can-size projector and camera to allow any flat space to be turned into a computer.
As for Milan, the software maker hopes to get the technology into lots of other areas, such as the education market, in addition to into consumers' hands. Although the initial customers are getting the same tabletop design, Microsoft says the product will eventually come in other shapes and sizes, including vertical, or stand-up units.
It's the interface that makes the difference. Not only is it easy to use, but unlike traditional computing, it's not an isolating experience.
"We're all connected through MySpace.com and have all these virtual worlds and virtual friends but we don't do a lot of socializing like this," Thompson said, pointing to several chairs seated around the Milan device.
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 11:17 AM
Click
here to view the original article.
What Is 'Photosynth'? Microsofts's 3D Photo Mapping Tool
The first official project/product from Microsoft's Live Labs is called "
Photosynth." What is it? It's hard to describe succinctly. It appears to be kind of mashup of things: photo sharing, visual search, mapping and 3-D.
To me, at least conceptually, it's pretty exciting. Here's a
video overview from Microsoft. (The video is something of a commercial for Live Labs, but also showcases Photosynth as a very provocative product.)
Earlier this year I did a longish post on Google Earth as an alternative search/browsing paradigm: the "Geobrowser." Google and Microsoft are now in something of a mapping arms race that has little to do with consumer or advertiser demand. And Microsoft, notwithstanding Google Earth's impressive features and developer community, believes it has the edge.
To see what's really interesting about Photosynth and its implications one needs to step back. The Internet began as a text-based medium and is now becoming more and more visually rich. The growth of image search and the meteoric rise of online video are just two examples of this. Online, multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds like Second Life are other examples of emerging, visually immersive online environments.
People have difficulty imagining what search will look like five years from now. But it may in fact be that we collectively look back in a decade or so and see today's text-based search as a quaint precursor to a much more engaging and multi-dimensional search paradigm - literally in 3-D.
According to the video Photosynth was a collaboration among groups at Microsoft, including the Virtual Earth team. The crew at Virtual Earth wants to build a rich, "immersive" visual environment that ties the real and the online worlds together.
Photosynth represents the merger of photosharing, community, search and 3-D mapping, with just a touch of gaming thrown in. Effectively it's an alternative web-search paradigm based on visual imagery. This type of approach doesn't replace the need for text-based search entirely but it could substitute for today's search in a substantial number of cases (especially for anything local or travel).
The vision of creating a "photorealistic" virtual world online is extremely ambitious. But ultimately I believe it's possible - and very exciting. The application will reportedly be available for download later this year.
Original article posted by Greg Sterling at August 2. Click
here to view the post.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 10:27 AM
To view the original article at Google, click
here.
What is Android?
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This beta version of the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
Features
-
Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
- Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
- Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
- Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
- SQLite for structured data storage
- Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
- GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
- Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
- Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
- Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
Android Architecture
The following diagram shows the major components of the Android operating system. Each section is described in more detail below.
Applications
Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.
Application Framework
Developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. The application architecture is designed to simplify the reuse of components; any application can publish its capabilities and any other application may then make use of those capabilities (subject to security constraints enforced by the framework). This same mechanism allows components to be replaced by the user.Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, including:
-
A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including lists, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser
- Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data
- A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, and layout files
- A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar
- An Activity Manager that manages the life cycle of applications and provides a common navigation backstack
For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see Writing an Android Application.
Libraries
Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are listed below:
System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices
Media Libraries - based on PacketVideo's OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG
Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications
LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view
SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine
3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer
FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering
SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications
Android Runtime
Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language.
Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included "dx" tool.
The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.
Linux Kernel
Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.
Click
here to view the original article.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments