More From Microsoft Live Labs

After surfing through the Microsoft Live Labs website some more I’ve learned about a few different apps that are in the labs and being worked on as we speak.

Perhaps the most famous of them is the Photosynth application. This takes a collection of images from the same place and stitches them together into a sort of 3D virtual image of the location.

Another promising application appeared to be the Seadragon app. The goal behind this app is to be able to display information on any screen, clearly and almost effortlessly regardless of the screen size.

If this sounds a little vague, consider the following four “promises” of Seadragon:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

The other couple of apps didn’t seem like too much to get me that interested in them aside from Volta, which promises to develop into a valuable developer tool to allow the splitting of application code across development languages. I’m just cutting my chops on .NET and VB so my ability to really soak up all that’s available there is a little skechy at best.

One thing I did think about when looking at this website of apps, there’s just too few right now. I’m sure with all the employees working for Microsoft, there’s got to be some pretty slick ideas in the heads of people. Does the Google method of allowing 20% of your time to be devoted to your side project really make the difference? If you could take 1-day a week and work on your own “idea”; what would it be?

Images: Microsoft Live Labs