All Natural Children S Furniture

Microsoft's boffins aim for the personal touch

With Project Lightspace, Microsoft researchers use ordinary furniture and sensor equipment to turn every surface in a room into a computer interface, writes MARIE BORAN  

WHEN SCIENCE fiction author William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” he knew that the best way to predict what kind of technologies the majority of us will be using in the next decade was to look at the experimental research going on in labs right now.

A rare glimpse inside Microsoft Research labs at its Redmond, Washington, campus points to a future where every surface becomes a computer, and the human body becomes the controller.

Advanced display and sensor technologies are beginning to break down the barriers between the digital and physical world, and Star Trek  ’s Holodeck doesn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea after all.

Don’t expect this in the shops in the near future, though; it’s part of the non-commercial research being carried out by one of 850 PhD researchers employed by Microsoft globally.

“We’re the ‘R’ in Microsoft’s R&D,” says Kevin Schofield, general manager of Microsoft Research.

“The vast majority of money is spent on development of new products. One per cent of the entire Microsoft staff works within research, but it’s very important to have this small number doing blue-sky stuff.”

The company’s research section resembles academia more than big industry in terms of functionality and research outcomes. Schofield says: “It’s like a really large computer science department. You don’t see published papers on our mission statement, but third-party peer review is very important to us.”

Despite being labelled as blue-sky, many of the experimental technologies developed in these labs have to come to pass as commercial products.

Most recently, this is how Xbox Kinect and the virtual keyboard for Windows Phone devices were developed.

The main areas of investment for Microsoft Research are natural language, machine learning, graphics, information retrieval and user experience.

You could say Project Lightspace is a combination of all of these. This is the brainchild of Andy Wilson, senior researcher and co-inventor of the first generation Microsoft Surface touchscreen device.

We’re ushered into a small, dark room where Wilson brings us to a large but unimpressive table. He points upwards to an arrangement of three projectors and depth sensors that are essentially prototypes of the slimline Kinect, and explains that this is Lightspace.