microsoft research

At TechFair 2013 in Washington D.C., Microsoft showed off an abundance of high-tech projects; the company states that the technology being designed by its research division, allows a glimpse into the future of technology. World class scientists working on the Redmond campus showed off how they could be an asset to some of society’s biggest challenges.

Microsoft Research is both an amazing establishment and frustrating one. It’s amazing because of the work they do - the future of technology being built today! It’s frustrating though because it can take years before we see the effects of such projects in commercial applications. With that understanding, it’s curious to see what Bing Now brings to the table.

Bing Now is a demonstration app by Microsoft Research that utilizes your phone’s microphones to gauge how crowded a particular restaurant or bar is at the moment. The idea behind it is that a user will check-in via Foursquare and during that process, a 6-10 seconds audio clip is recorded and analyzed for information. With 80% accuracy, the Bing Now app was able to predictably estimate the amount of people at the establishment and more. Users can also listen to the sample on their phones to hear it themselves.

Anyone who makes use of GPS functionality on a smartphone understands the impact such connectivity has on the limited battery supply that's packed inside the device. Unfortunately, we're not quite at the stage where 10,000mAh batteries are utilised, so Microsoft Research has been working on a cloud-powered GPS chip that will reportedly slash battery consumption on smartphones.

For those of you who like the Microsoft Research branded Face Swap and Face Mask you'll want to pick up v1.1 which just went live.

The popular Face Swap app allows you to take a photo with two people and then switch their faces. The app uses a sophisticated face recognition algorithm to accurately and seamlessly swap faces between your two victims, giving a bizarre and creepy effect. Likewise, Face Mask does the same but with goofy cartoon effects, making your victim look exceptionally silly.

Both apps got bumped to version 1.1 and finally fix the link to "other" Face Party apps (before it read "coming soon") and also addresses a common crash when there were too many photos within the app. No other changes are noted, but we can't complain for what are two of the most fun and free apps around. Grab it Face Swap here in the Marketplace and Face Mask here.

Microsoft Research has released Face Swap over at the Windows Phone Marketplace that allows you to swap people's faces around in photographs. Face Swap uses multiple face detection to identify everyone's faces and with a shake of your Windows Phone, the app swaps the faces around.

Once you've created your newly arranged photo, you can save it to your Photos Hub or share it directly to Facebook or Twitter. Face Swap is a free app that you can grab here at the Windows Phone Marketplace. It is a mango app so you'll need to be running Windows Phone 7.5.  Face Swap is sure to make for interesting Holiday group pictures.

Over at iStartedSomething, Long Zheng posted a nice little clip from Microsoft Research dealing with 2D object recognition, which for those who have been following, is instantiated in Windows Phone "Mango" as Bing Vision (see demo). The tool of course allows to you scan various 2D objects like CDs, DVDs, posters, barcodes, etc. which can then access a database for pricing and product info.

In this brief segment, Rick Szeliski from Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media group goes into detail of how this works. While it's some heady stuff, most of you should be able to watch the ~4 minute segment and get an understanding of how this stuff happens and what the current limitations are--specifically 3D objects and "generics" likes recognizing your pet or people.

While Google has had Goggles for awhile and all of this is based on pre-existing tech, it's neat to see it explained. Plus it doesn't take the magic away when you actually use Bing Vision on your phone (as anyone who has demoed this to a non-techy can attest too). Pretty amazing work when you think about it.

Read moe at iStartedSomething

Microsoft Research (site) is doing some cool stuff and we're more than pleased to have them release multiple apps on Windows Phones, letting us test what they're doing e.g. Project Emporia.

'Engkoo' (hands down the oddest name) is a new dictionary app that is used on Bing in China (for translation) and now it can be in your pocket:

Free dictionary and translation based on new technology from Microsoft Research. Currently supporting English-English and English-Chinese (Simplified). Define/translate a word, phrase or sentence. Features include: fresh definitions and sample sentences mined from the web, pronunciation (audio), autocomplete with built-in support for spelling correction, wildcard (*, ?), and pinyin input. Learn more about the Engkoo project @ http://research.microsoft.com/projects/engkoo

The app is fairly basic: you type in a word, a phrase or a sentence and it auto-looks up the translation in Chinese--but the science behind it...woo, there's some magic happening in the cloud. Okay, so the app right now is mainly for Chinese users learning English, the point is Microsoft is figuring out how to make learning language easier and more dynamic by using the power of the web to harness better examples. In the future, it looks to be expanded to other languages and I'm not going to lie, as a former linguist, I find the project extremely interesting.

Grab the app here in the Marketplace. via WPSauce