Microsoft previews research efforts

Microsoft has been making much of the company's myriad multi-touch input projects. But Microsoft's view of what the user interface of the future will look like is more complex than that.

Instead of allowing users to interact only with touch or only with speech, Microsoft is working on interfaces that will combine multiple natural-input techniques. At last week's Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), Microsoft officials showed off a demo of an automated front-desk receptionist, which the company plans to deploy internally later this year. The receptionist will make corporate-shuttle reservations and provide information, etc.

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The automated receptionist is one of the fruits of a Microsoft Research effort, known as the Situated Interaction project. Other projects the Situated Interaction team is investigating include "multi-participant engagement and dialog models, conversational scene analysis, spatio-temporal trajectory reasoning, and behavioural modelling".

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, outlined some of Microsoft's thinking during his keynote at FAM. He said: "When people talk about a natural user interface, you know, we talk about handwriting and touch and speech and these things but this is what a natural user interface is really going to be all about. And it won't be just your receptionist.

"I mean, you should be able to come to computers and interact with them in a much more natural way, to ask questions, have them respond to you to do tasks that are valuable to you. And I think this is just the tip of the iceberg but it's the first example built in a completely new way using these robotics technologies that we brought to the market two years ago. And so this isn't really about just programming arms that assemble cars in the factory or making things that run around hospital floors, this is in many ways the beginning of building very complex interactive applications."

Mundie also showed off during FAM a demo that combined a variety of natural-interface technologies - everything from facial recognition, to more spatial recognition.

Mundie referred to the demo as an example of "first life" - which he described as "a mirror world of 3D that everybody can participate in constructing and maintaining and which gives us a navigational metaphor that's completely consistent with the world we already live in".

Mary-Jo Foley writes for ZDNET.com