Tag: Research

Up until now, singers needed to either play an instrument or the help of a professional accompanist to help them realize their musical ideas. With this new technology coming out of Microsoft Research, vocalists need only sing their ideas into a microphone to automatically generate musical accompaniment.

Most robots are controlled using a joystick or other traditional input device, but this new system allows operators to issue commands to robots using simple hand and body gestures. Developed by engineer Tsuyoshi Horo at Tokyo University, the system uses a circular array of cameras to detect human movements in the room, then convey them to a robot as directional commands.

The gaming world is full of MMORPGs, games that feature interaction of hundreds or thousands of players. However, these games usually don’t put them all in the same place at the same time, and don’t have hundreds battling each other at the same time.

Just a few weeks back, Microsoft introduced their Surface tabletop multi-touch computer. Now Microsoft Research is showing off a prototype of a multi-touch interface portable computer. By hacking some infrared sensors through the back of a standard laptop display, they’re able to track the locations and pressure from multiple finger locations.

A group of scientists working with the National Human Genome Research Institute claim to have identified the specific gene that controls the size of dogs. Without getting into all of the scientific details (I flunked biology,) the researchers screened a group of almost 500 Portuguese water dogs (a breed with lots of size variance,) and sequenced their DNA to identify the differences.

Check out this cool video of Microsoft’s prototype for an augmented reality system known as “PlayAnywhere“. The system combines a video projector and a sensing device that can detect a user’s gestures and the position objects placed on a surface in real time, and utilize that data to create a highly interactive and intuitive user interface.