Next at Microsoft

Forza Motorsport 4 Porsche Expansion Pack

Steve Clayton - Editor — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Having once driven around the legendary Nurburgring in a Porsche 911 I will now be regularly recreating the experience with the launch of the Forza Motorsport 4 Porsche Expansion Pack this week.

The Porsche Expansion Pack includes 30 incredible as well as 20 new Porsche-themed career events.

Game on.

What’s Next for 3-D printing?

Steve Clayton - Editor — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:55:00 GMT

WIRED takes a look at what's over the horizon for 3-D printing.

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Microsoft Garage Science Fair 2012 (India edition)

Steve Clayton - Editor — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Last week Microsoft India held their third Garage Science Fair at the Hyderabad campus and it was another roaring success with Windows 8, Windows Phone and Kinect in starring roles.

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Kinect is watching for autism

Steve Clayton - Editor — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT

The University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development in Minneapolis is exploring whether Kinect can help detect early signs of autism.

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In the world cup of data, Microsoft Research just broke the speed record

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

The MinuteSort benchmark is considered the “World Cup” of data sorting and a team from Microsoft Research just blew past the previous record.

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Kinect for Windows 1.5 released with face tracking SDK and more

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:15:00 GMT

Since the Kinect for Windows sensor and SDK arrived, the team has been adding more features and countries in which the product is available at a fair old clip. Today they released version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows runtime and SDK.

Kinect for Windows hardware is now available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan and beginning next month it will arrive in 15 additional countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

The 1.5 SDK also brings a number of new capabilities, all of which are detailed on the Kinect for Windows blog. Some highlights include

Kinect Studio. A new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.
Face Tracking SDK. Which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.
Seated Skeletal Tracking is now available.
New capabilities to enable avatar animation scenarios.
Four new languages for speech recognition – French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

Having seen what the Kinect Accelerator teams are building with Kinect for Windows, I’m now even more excited to see what the new groups of developers who have access are going to build. I’ll have a few big name customers to talk about next week and show you what they’re doing with it!

Win a limited edition Arc Touch Mouse with one tweet

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:05:00 GMT

Send a tweet to @MSFTHardware with your fondest memory of the 1980's to be in for a chance to win a very limited edition Arc Touch Mouse. All part of the celebration of 30 years of hardware at Microsoft.

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A guide to London this summer

Steve Clayton - Editor — Sat, 19 May 2012 12:15:00 GMT

Heading to London this summer? Check out some analog and digital resources to guide you through the 62,738 events that are taking place in the city.

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Brandon Generator: All the web is a stage

Steve Clayton - Editor — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:30:00 GMT

Brandon Generator is a showcase of many things, not least the talents of Edgar Wright and Tommy Lee Edwards but also HTML5 and IE9. This is storytelling.

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Beginning programming Kinect?

Steve Clayton - Editor — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Are you thinking of cranking out something amazing with Kinect? A new book could help you along the way - it promises to leave you with a working application by the end of chapter 1.

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Approaching Embedded Intelligently

Steve Clayton - Editor — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Windows Embedded launched a new blog recently and if you're interested in the Internet of Things or the emerging field of Intelligent Systems, it's a great resource.

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Steve Clayton: How To Design Technology So It Becomes Natural

Steve Clayton - Editor — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Some bloke called Steve Clayton, talking about how in the future, technology will be much more natural.

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Culturematic: curating culture

Steve Clayton - Editor — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Grant McCracken spoke at the PSFK New York conference about the remixing of culture that we see across the online and offline worlds - it's 7 minutes of cultural enlightenment.

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Aviary photo editing platform lands on Windows Phone with Photo Genius feature

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:17:00 GMT

Aviary has released their SDK for Windows Phone, enabling developers to embed incredible photo editing right inside of their app.

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LinkedIn app for Windows Phone arrives

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:45:00 GMT

LinkedIn for Windows Phone is now available in the marketplace.

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We've lost the meaning of the word passion

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:10:00 GMT

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Weather Flow for Windows Phone

Steve Clayton - Editor — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Weather Flow adds some beauty to your Windows Phone regardless of the weather.

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The new Bing

Steve Clayton - Editor — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

The 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done.

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CHI 2012: Microsoft Research explores the potential for emotional technology

Steve Clayton - Editor — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

CHI 2012: Whenever you get a bunch of experience designers together, you're sure to see some amazing stuff.

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Is the future of TV clickable?

Steve Clayton - Editor — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:10:00 GMT

A recent music video claims to be the "world’s first interactive shoppable music video". Does is offer a glimpse of the future of all TV?

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Nokia City Lens for Lumia Windows Phones

Steve Clayton - Editor — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Nokai's City Lens app is now available (in beta) and brings a Metro style augmented reality browser to the Lumia range of Windows Phone's.

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Blending the physical and digital with an AR sandbox

Steve Clayton - Editor — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

A UC Davis project for the National Science Foundation used Kinect to show an early prototype of an augmented reality sandbox.

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Microsoft Research shows dual views on existing LCD displays

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Wouldn't it be cool if you could see two different images simultaneously from an existing LCD screen? A Microsoft Research team demonstrated that it's perfectly possible at CHI2012 today.

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Microsoft Research at CHI 2012: new projects showing the blending of physical and digital

Steve Clayton - Editor — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:30:00 GMT

The ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is taking place this week in Austin, Texas. It’s more well known as CHI and as always, Microsoft Research is there in force.

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The Making of Forza Motorsport 4: Physics, Pirelli and Performance

Steve Clayton - Editor — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

This latest video from the team behind Forza Motorsport 4 focuses on the unique partnership between Turn 10 Studios and Pirelli to refine and perfect the tire performance model in the game.

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