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

Post from: EveryJoe

More From Microsoft Live Labs

Remember when Robert Scoble, was reduced to tears over something that he had gotten a peak of at Microsoft’s development teams? It turns out that the cause of all the eye leaking is now available to the public.

The Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope (why can I not get David Letterman’s production company ‘Worldwide Pants’ out of my mind?).

I’m not so sure about being reduced to tears, but the effort is pretty daunting and Microsoft appears to have done a great job of delivering on a very expansive area.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelengths: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.

The functionality provided by the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ is quite impressive. Maybe I can understand how it would bring a tear to your eye if that’s what rocked your radar.

Post from: EveryJoe

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