Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Mobile: Future of the Internet

Mobile phones will become the primary Internet device for most people by 2020, largely due to their increasing computing power, predicts the "Future of the Internet," a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report. "Telephony [will be] offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world to another," the report says. The report, based on a survey of 578 Internet activists, builders, and commentators, also predicts that despite the widespread access to other cultures and viewpoints on the Internet, Internet use will not make people more socially tolerant. The report says that some survey respondents even suggested that the divide between the tolerant and the intolerant could widen due to Internet-based information-sharing tactics. The report also found that 55 percent of experts believe that by 2020 people will routinely interact in artificial spaces through virtual worlds and other types of augmented reality. Voice activation and touch interfaces will be common by 2020, predict nearly two-thirds of experts, and "air-typing" will become common because small handheld devices will display a full size virtual keyboard on any flat surface. A majority of experts, 78 percent, believe that the current Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a new system in 2020, but search, security, and reliability will have been improved by next-generation research.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Microsoft Research Projects

Microsoft is supporting a host of projects in its research and development division that are focused on tackling real-world technical challenges but could have a potentially dramatic impact on computing. One such project is Eagle 1, a tool for disaster recovery teams that captures information from multiple databases and generates real-time interactive maps through the use of geospatial mapping technology. Microsoft Surface, which has reached the product phase, promotes social interaction through a multitouch table with a ruggedized acrylic interface. Its capabilities include object recognition, optical tagging, and interaction with physical objects. LucidTouch V2 technology is a credit card-sized display screen that the user can reach behind to control a mobile device. Visual Studio 2010 upgrades Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform with new features that include unified modeling language, a debugging tool that can pinpoint non-reproducible bugs by automatically generating data sets, and an application that lets development teams visualize a model of the existing development architecture and find any existing code assets that are not well categorized. The Touch Wall is a new hardware/software interface with multitouch control that can mix and match media on the same large-screen display to enhance collaboration. The OSLO project offers a framework that allows all members of a team to access data models in a repository across the entire software development life cycle. Microsoft also is working on a robotic receptionist to be installed at the company headquarters that will help visitors find transportation, using voice and facial recognition technology. Finally, BlueTrack is mouse technology that employs a wider and brighter laser beam than conventional optics so that it can operate on uneven surfaces.