Everything Is a Screen as Microsoft Imagines Future Productivity

If I can offer one piece of advice for people looking to invest in future needs, it would be this; invest in screen cleaning fluids and wipes. Soon everything from your coffee table to your kitchen counter and the wall in your living room will have screen capabilities.

Screens are both shrinking and growing, but they are also becoming thinner, mobile and more powerful everyday. Projection and surface technology are evolving quickly to enable the kind of interaction imagined in the video I’ve embedded above from Microsoft Office Labs.

It’s been almost ten years since we watched Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report interact with hologram projections both as a participant and as a target of personalized advertising. Now interactive digital screens are everywhere around us, from bathroom mirrors to interactive Out-of-Home advertising and information systems that can respond to gestures, voice or input from personal mobile devices.

People carry smartphones and tablets that easily eclipse the computing power of personal computers from just a decade earlier and feature applications that augment their productivity, providing instant communication, and allowing them to connect and interact with personal and public data stored in the cloud. It’s possible that you may even be reading this post on a mobile phone or tablet.

Microsoft’s video walks us through a day in the life of people from around the globe as they collaborate on projects, or search for an apple pie recipe for the school bake sale. They easily move their work from personal screen to shared screen and even to the space around them.

Can you imagine how your daily life will change when we are freed from our traditional screens?

Delvinia Named an Official Honoree of the 15th Annual Webby Awards

The No Friend Left Behind marketing campaign—designed by Delvinia to promote Microsoft’s launch of Window’s Live Messenger for the iPhone and iPod touch—has been recognized as an Official Honoree in the 15^th Annual Webby Awards, presented by the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences.

Launched in August 2010, the No Friend Left Behind campaign is a creative concept that highlights the critical moments when you need the expertise of the friends on your IM list the most—all while poking fun at the fact that different friends meet different needs in our daily lives.

The app encourages users to download a badge that best describes their personality—examples include stylista, foodie, wingman and party pro—and then add it as their Messenger, Facebook or Twitter profile picture. Participants are then challenged with getting their friends to vote for them to unlock higher level badges and gain street cred.

The International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences acknowledges outstanding entries as Official Honorees, alongside Nominees and Winners. With nearly 10,000 entries received from more than 60 countries, the Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 10 per cent of entries that exhibit remarkable achievement.

Microsoft Kinects with Hackers

When Microsoft’s Kinect for the XBox 360 came out last November its relatively low cost and ability to both record video and sense the position of objects in 3D space made it an extremely tempting piece of hardware for hackers.

A $3,000 bounty was offered by Adafruit Industries to the first person who could create open-source drivers for the hardware. The prize was quickly claimed and hackers began using the drivers to create some amazing applications for the Kinect.

Here’s one of my favourites:

Microsoft recently announced they will be releasing a free SDK for the Kinect this spring, reversing the company’s initial “hands off” position. No doubt the flood of good publicity the hackers created around Kinect influenced the decision to officially open it up for developers. It will be interesting to see how the official SDK compares with the open-source drivers.

In a spy versus spy twist it has been revealed that the bounty for the open-source drivers was started by a former Microsoft employee who worked on developing the Kinect. Wow. I hope he has good lawyers.