Stefan Mileschin

Software behemoth Microsoft has also been in the forefront of hardware almost forever - hey don't forget the mouse. Although it’s been a little bit late to the game with tablets and that, it has multiple projects that it believes will be game changers in the future.

Alex Butler, senior research director, at Microsoft Cambridge, showed off quite a number of projects that may, one day, be turned into products you can buy.

Butler told the audience at IEF2013 in Dublin: “Touch is everywhere in today’s age and we’re all used to touching, typing and swiping. We think this is all very natural. New hardware enables new types of software and touch has just opened the door.”

Butler’s unit - Microsoft Research - has 850 futuristic people around the world. “We’re a little like a university, looking 5, 10 or 15 years ahead without being tied to products,” he said. “Stuff does feed into the product line. The applied sciences group look at new materials and technologies.”

He said that Microsoft continues to work on the surface table – that’s a table not a tablet folks, but, he said, it’s still a little underexploited. Microsoft wants to create a very thin table design that uses infrared to sense a whole variety of objects. It’s essentially a low resolution camera with 1,000 sensors in it, he said.

It’s also experimenting with SideSight for small form factors using side sensors, which works much lke paper. Mouse 2.0 adds multi-touch to a mouse and uses diffuse illumination.

A project called Digits which involves a camera worn on your body that leaves your fingers free, allows you to, for example, turn virtual knobs.

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