Once again Microsoft is showing some love for iOS. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth app, not yet available for Windows Phone 7, debuted this afternoon on Apple’s platform and with it comes a completely submersive panorama experience. If you’re familiar with the 360 Panorama app on iOS, this a more advanced, free version.
Tagged ‘Microsoft Research’
The smartphone gods are looking down on us this fine Wednesday morning. In today’s US Update we start off with the new king of Android smartphones, the HTC EVO 3D. Then we take a look at the upcoming SlingLoaded HDS-600RS for EchoStar Europe and some strange happenings with the Amazon Appstore and Angry Birds Rio. Ready, set, go.
We’ve seen just about every possible Kinect hack we can think of, heck we’ve even seen it used to control a Playstation 3. Today, Microsoft Research tossed us a bone thanks to an 8-page research publication titled “Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from a Single Depth Image”. Don’t let the title fool you, this document contains tons of interesting facts, science and data behind the algorithms of Kinect.
Microsoft maps could soon include that most ingenious of travel smarts – cabbie’s knowledge. Microsoft researchers in Beijing are mining taxi driver smarts to create better driving directions. The researchers have analysed GPS data from 33,000 cabs in the city to find more efficient routes. “These factors are very subtle and difficult to incorporate into existing routing engines,” says Yu Zheng of Microsoft Research Asia. If his research pays off, we could see Bing Maps with a built-in London cabbie algorithm…
Out TBC | £TBC | Microsoft (via MIT Technology Review)
The Microsoft Surface tables we’ve seen so far are a little hefty to put it mildly but principal researcher Bill Buxton says we’ll see a radically thinner version headed for our homes within the next three years. Are you ready for a camera-packing Microsoft Surface with image recognition skills built in to your dining table?
When it arrived yesterday, Gmail Priority Inbox looked a little familiar to veteran Microsoft watchers. A long term project created by Microsoft Research seems to have been tinkering with the same approach to organising emails and what’s more it has the patents to prove it…