Microsoft demonstrates touch screen for any surface [video]

Microsoft OmniTouch

Microsoft is developing a new technology in its research labs that will allow users to touch any surface as if it were a touch screen.

The technology is called OmniTouch and was born in Microsoft’s Research labs. The software giant has created a prototype unit that is wearable and projects images onto various surfaces. The interactions can take place on the go with no calibration required. Imagine holding up your hand and dialling a number in the palm of your hand, that’s how OmniTouch works. ”We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” explains Hrvoje Benko, of the Natural Interaction Research group. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet. If we could appropriate these ad hoc surfaces in an on-demand way, we could deliver all of the benefits of mobility while expanding the user’s interactive capability.”

The custom camera works in a similar way to Microsoft’s Kinect system but has been modified to work at short range. A user simply carries the camera on their person and the system will project user interfaces onto various surfaces. “We wanted the ability to use any surface,” Benko says. “Let the user define the area of where they want the interface to be, and have the system do its best to track it frame to frame. This creates a highly flexible, on-demand user interface. You can tap on your hand or drag your interface out to specify the top left and bottom right border. All this stems from the main idea that if everything around you is a potential interface, then the first action has to be defining an interface area.”

Microsoft is demonstrating the technology as part of its presentation during UIST 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, being held Oct. 16-19 in Santa Barbara, California.

Microsoft Reserachers let you leech torrents while your PC is sleeping.

Some folks at Microsoft Research of all places have come up with a clever way for you to save electricity and increase your ratio: The researchers have built the prototype of a new network adapter called Somniloquy that can download data via Bittorrent and even offer basic Instant Messaging capabilities while the PC is in sleep mode. A PDF detailing their research is available here.



How is this possible? Somniloquy uses a secondary, low-power processor that can handle basic tasks even while a PC is asleep. It's also capable of better wakeup triggers in the case that someone calls your Skype account. From a recently published paper about the network adapter:

"Experiments using our prototype Somniloquy implementation, a USB-based network interface, demonstrates energy savings of 60% to 80% in most commonly occuring scenarios. This translates to significant cost savings for PC users. BitTorrent and large web downloads, in the background. In existing systems, these applications would stop when the PC sleeps."

Somniloquy uses ctorrent for all its torrent downloading needs. Media files are temporarily stored on an SD memory card, and the PC occasionally starts up to copy those files and free up the space on the SD card. The researchers tested the interface's Bittorrent capabilities with torrents from Legaltorrents.com, and it seemed like the device was fine as long as only one torrent at a time got transfered.

So how green is Somniloquy? Your potential personal energy savings of course depend on the time your PC has to sleep, as well as the size of your "cache" SD card. Somniloquy's developers did however test a few scenarios, and came to the conclusion that a network card like this one could theoretically lead to energy savings of up to 91% for a large web download. Bittorrent download are expected to lad to similar results.

Facebook utilizes Microsoft PhotoDNA technology to combat child porn.

Microsoft’s PhotoDNS technology

Microsoft and Facebook announced a unique new partnership on Thursday.

The social media giant is taking advantage of Microsoft’s PhotoDNS technology to identify online child pornography. Microsoft’s technology can track pictures even if they are altered or cropped and uploaded to online services. The technology is based on Microsoft’s Research investments. Facebook is the first service to start using the free technology.

Facebook has started using PhotoDNA to track down thousands of images uploaded to its servers every day. The social networking site has around 200 million images uploaded by its users every day. PhotoDNA works by creating a unique identifier for an image known to contain child pornography. The identifier represents the image and allows Microsoft’s technology to scan large data sets in a similar way to how antivirus programs operate.

The New York times, who first reported the partnership, note that Microsoft has tested the technology on its own SkyDrive, Windows Live and Bing services during the last year. The software gaint compared 10 million images to an inventory of 10,000 illegal photos and found around 125 hits per day. “We’re very passionate about PhotoDNA because we’ve seen it work,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’ s general counsel. “We invented it through Microsoft Research, and we are trying to give it away free, including to our competitors.”

Facebook will host an online press event at 3:00 p.m. (ET) on Friday to explain how it’s using the technology.

Tags: Winrumors