Microsoft Live Labs: Blog

Thumbtack

David Vos — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:16:00 GMT

We wanted to say thank you to all those who have participated in the Thumbtack project and let our remaining participants know that we are currently in the process of retiring this experiment. We have learned a lot thanks to your participation and feedback and look forward to your continued enthusiasm and engagement on future Live Labs projects. The service will remain online through November 30^th to allow participants to access and back up any information they would like to retrieve. In the meantime, you can access thumbtack normally here.

Introducing Seadragon.com

Live Labs Admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:50:00 GMT

At Seadragon.com you can share any image on the web as a zoomable photo. Simply point Seadragon.com at any image you've got on the web, and in no time flat, you've got a zoomable viewer just like this one. Share the link on Facebook, Twitter, or through email or IM. Or embed it directly on your blog, eBay listing or virtually any site. Go ahead, click on the image below (or use your mousewheel) to zoom in, and drag it to pan around.

Seadragon.com allows you to share virtually any size image on the web, whether it is a five, ten or two hundred megapixels. Because the viewer uses the same Deep Zoom image technology available to developers in Microsoft Silverlight, no matter what size the image is it loads quickly. The embedded viewer adjusts dynamically to the layout of your page, or can be customized to a specific size with just a quick change to a script size, so now any size image fits perfectly on your site. And because Seadragon.com uses a dual-mode Silverlight & AJAX control, it works on virtually any browser--automatically using Silverlight to provide a smoother experience and better performance when available, and defaulting to a scripted viewer when it is not. Try creating one yourself.

Built on Azure

Seadragon.com is built entirely on top of Windows Azure. And not some super secret Microsoft-only version, but the same CTP version that is available for you to try today. The architecture takes unique advantage of Windows Azure's distributed nature and is a great example for what this new platform is capable of, even in its early CTP state.

One quick note for the first few dragons through the door: On occasion Seadragon.com may automatically suspend the creation of new images for a few moments (but we will continue to serve up images and embeds without interruption). If you encounter this message, please just check shortly as uploads will automatically resume when the backup clears.

Why does the service do this? Simply because we built on the exact same CTP version of Windows Azure that you have access to, which still carries a few temporary restrictions as a preview. These scale restrictions will go away with the official release of Windows Azure. But until they are available to everyone, we won't be using them either. Because that's how we roll in Live Labs.

What’s Next for Live Labs

Live Labs Admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:04:00 GMT

We’d like to share a little news about Live Labs with you. We’ve recently made some changes to our organization, and a number of teams from within the lab will be joining product groups around the company. For instance, the social streams team will be joining MSN. Some of our engineers will be helping out with the next generation of Windows Mobile. And others are off to Live Search and Microsoft Advertising. The rest of us will continue our work on building new web experiences, as we always have. But moving great people and projects into the the product groups has always been part of our process, so today's news is entirely consistent with what we've always done.

Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort. In the coming weeks and months we'll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more. Going forward, we intend to focus on a smaller number of projects relative to what we've done in the past, but invest in them at a much bigger scale. So to be clear, our most ambitious and exciting projects are yet to come. Stay tuned.

When is a game more than a game?

Live Labs Admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:16:00 GMT

At Live Labs, research is an important part of what we do. Recently researchers Paul Bennett, Max Chickering and Anton Mityagin released some new data about a game project they did last year. To users, Picture This was a matching game. But to the researchers, it was providing valuable data about search and machine learning. They’ve now released the data in an anonymized form, so that other researchers can use it to try and reproduce their results without revealing any personal information about the people who participated. And along with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University, they're organizing a workshop at the ACM-SIGKDD Conference in Paris this June that will focus on similar games and other applications of Human Computation.

You can learn more about their experiment by checking out this page.

Infinite Canvas Gathering Buzz

Live Labs Admin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:09:55 GMT

Infinite Canvas, a new way of looking at comics on the web developed by Live Labs' own Ian Gilman has started getting some attention lately.

Infinite Canvas is a JavaScript application that frees visual storytelling from the usual comic format of squares on a page. It started to take off when Neil Gaiman (whom Ian describes as “one of the gods of the sci-fi/fantasy world”) tweeted about a piece he put up called “The Day The Saucers Came.” Now we’re starting to get comments like:

“I’ve just seen the future of how to present comics online”
“Loved the story. Absolutely awed by the format”
“If this catches on it could be very cool.”

Take a look at Infinite Canvas and see if you see the future of comics on the web.

Web Sandbox Going Open Source

Live Labs Admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:40:00 GMT

We are now making most of the source code for the Web Sandbox project available under the Open Source Apache License 2.0.

Since the initial release of Web Sandbox we have received a great deal of feedback from the web security community. We have also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities that would like to adopt the technology when it is ready. Our goal is to achieve widespread adoption of Web Sandbox and to help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks.

See the Web Sandbox site for additional licensing details. thanks for your input to the project so far, and we're excited to continue our collaboration with you.

Photosynth hits the big time

Live Labs Admin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:20:00 GMT

They say you know you've made it when you get skewered on the Colbert Report. Well, our congratulations to Photosynth--you've made it. (video after the break).

CNN used Photosynth technology during the inauguration. Here's Stephen Colbert making fun of it (and John King):

Seadragon Goes Mobile

Live Labs Admin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:08:00 GMT

Want to see giga-pixel images on your iPhone? Now you can--with Seadragon Mobile.

Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform. Get super-close in on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger. Browse an entire collection of photos from a single screen. You can browse Deep Zoom Images that you can create from your own pictures or your Photosynth collection (or anybody else's).

Seadragon Mobile is available for free at the iTunes App Store.

Update: The earlier issues we were having with "Browse Photosynth" and intermittent failures viewing synth collections have now been resolved. Many thanks to everybody who reported the issues to us.

Here's a video of developer Ben Vanik talking about the promise of Seadragon Mobile. Or you can see his interview with our friends over at Channel 10.

Red White and Blue Fade to Black

Live Labs Admin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:16:30 GMT

Many of the projects we try at Live Labs are designed to last just long enough for us to confirm or disprove our assumptions—interactive experimentation helps us prove things that are hard to research any other way. Political Streams was one of those. The American election season provided a great opportunity for us to try it out, since people’s interest in political news and blogs was stronger than usual (in this case possibly the strongest ever). That allowed us to find out more about the workings of complex social information aggregators in a very short period of time. Thanks to those who joined us in Political Streams.

Introducing Thumbtack

Live Labs Admin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:35:00 GMT

People have always had a need to make sense of the world around them. We want to identify, classify and clarify things. Lately that need has become even greater, since we’re being bombarded with information wherever we look. Now there’s a new tool to help you organize all that information: Thumbtack.

Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you find on the Web in a single place. Compare prices, colors, styles or locations at a glance. Grab the stuff you want from lots of different sites, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online.

Thumbtack uses machine learning and natural language techniques to understand the information you give it—it automatically extracts addresses, for instance, and the Address Gadget will then automatically plot that address on a map. Other gadgets help you compare items in your collection, or arrange them the way that’s easiest for you to see them.

It’s easy to use. Just start a new collection, add stuff to it, then send it to your friend via e-mail, publish it to the Web or an RSS feed, or embed it in your blog. Give it a try.