Items tagged with Microsoft Research
There may come a time when a generation of users views paper-based Post-It notes as relics of a bygone era, and it could happen sooner than you think. Microsoft has already taken a step in that direction by developing a protytpe ultra-lower power display that combines an e-ink screen with photovoltaic energy harvesting and Bluetooth LE wireless technology. The end result is a Post-It sized display that can be deployed in a number of different places. Depending on the amount of ambient lighting, it can be updated every 1 to 25 minutes by communicating with a PC or smartphone. A user might find that handy for displaying outdoor weather conditions, stock quotes, or other dynamic data sets that are...
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We're finally starting to see the world of virtual reality unfold to an eager and (so far) receptive audience. While most of the attention to this point has been on gaming, the technology itself is the most interesting part, especially since we're still at a relatively early stage of VR. One of the things to keep an eye on is the evolution of hand tracking, which Microsoft believes is nearly slick enough for mainstream use. "How do we interact with things in the real world? Well, we pick them up, we touch them with our fingers, we manipulate them," said Shotton, a principal researcher in computer vision at Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, research lab. "We should be able to do exactly the same thing...
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Cloud gaming is a technology that's already here, but with high bandwidth requirements and data caps still a thing that mobile users have to contend with, there's definitely room for improvement. The question is, how? Researchers at Duke University and Microsoft Research have been working together to answer that very question, and what they've come up with is a promising new tool that could lead to console-like graphics on mobile devices with comparatively little bandwidth requirements. The tool is called "Kahawai," which is the Hawaiian word for stream. What Kahawai does is task the mobile device -- smartphone or tablet -- with generating a rough sketch of each frame in a game, or a few high-detail...
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A group of researchers from the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research released a paper titled An Untold Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks in which they reveal why and how cellular service is both sub-optimal and insecure. How did they do it? They developed a tool called NetPiculet, which uses intelligent measurement to probe middlebox policies in cellular networks, focusing on firewalls and NAT boxes, and released it into the wild in the form of an Android app. In addition to earning 50 points for coming up with a creative and effective way of gathering data from geographically diverse cellular networks, the team was rewarded with nearly 400 de facto data-gatherers who collected...
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