Microsoft College Tour 09: mindblowing natural user interface concept demos

Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, was at Harvard days ago on account of Microsoft College Tour 2009. The event focused on developing of a “natural user interface” for computers and the ability of technology to help scientists research the environment. Usually the event was showcased by Bill Gates, which is now a responsibility of Craig’s.First, let us know what is Microsoft College Tour. Here’s Microsoft’s say on this program.

“Today’s students live at a time when technology has the potential to make significant changes in the world. Huge leaps in computing power, the shift to a client plus cloud platform, the emergence of more natural user interfaces, the ability to manipulate and understand terabytes of data – all are creating a world where college graduates will have remarkable capabilities at their fingertips. Those capabilities will create opportunities to tackle some of the planet’s toughest challenges, from environmental change, to growing the global economy, to improving healthcare and education.

This week Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, visits four college campuses to talk with students about how the new capabilities in computing will help solve these complex issues. At Cornell, Harvard, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington, Mundie will show the leading-edge work taking place at Microsoft.”

Yeah, that’s a bit lengthy, so I wont blame you if you skipped some parts. Simply put, it’s all about showing cool developments to students and making them interested in computer science (Just trying to interpret MS’s words – only literally! ).
Anyway, as I said before, the event at Harvard focused on a “natural user interface” for computers. Craig showed the new user interface being developed at Microsoft using a MS Tablet PC. Some of his words were,

“I think, what will happen in the future is that people’s work surfaces will actually be built where they have a set of displays that are vertical ones, increasingly I think these will be 3 dimensional “

In the demo, Craig used a transparent glass display which worked with the Tablet to show how this UI works. He also showed some voice commands to perform some basic tasks such as zooming. Checkout the videos…

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