I've just spent a beautifully sunny Seattle day at Microsoft's TechFest 07, which is designed to show off some of the projects under way at Microsoft Research to Microsoft's own developers in Redmond. It is intended to be a "technology transfer" event, and it's needed because Microsoft now has research labs in distant lands such as Cambridge, Beijing, Bangalore and Silicon Valley.
For some reason, Microsoft also decided to invite 75 journalists from all over the world -- I've been chatting to people from Australia, India, Italy and Moscow, to name but a few. It was also a delight to meet Todd Bishop from the Seattle-PI newspaper, and former Microsoft geek blogger Robert Scoble.
Monkeybites on the Wired Blog Network has some useful coverage of a few of the exhibits -- including many of the British ones (Time Mill, Shoebox, Text2Paper, Bubbleboard, Postcard). It seemed like half the Cambridge team was there, including Andy Herbert and Ken Wood.
Andy Wilson from Redmond also put on a good show with Zune Buggy and other things. Zune Buggy is a game idea a bit like MicroMachines, except that you can drive a "virtual car" that is projected onto a table top, as well as displayed on a screen. You can make the table top a bit more interesting by putting some paper "scenery" on it, and drive the car up and down these. Someone put a hand on the table, and Wilson drove the car over his hand an half way up his arm. Don't expect this kind of thing in the shops any time soon.....
One of the best displays of something you can actually use was of the Personal SkyServer, which is a lot like Virtual Earth, except it maps the universe. Keep zooming in on a galaxy such as M106 and you see some amazing things -- thanks to pictures from the Hubble telescope.
On a sad note, the SkyServer site says "Send mail to Gray@Microsoft.com to be added to the Personal SkyServer Updates mailing list." Jim Gray, a Turing award winner, sailed out of San Francisco alone on his 40-foot yacht in January, and has not been seen since.
