Microsoft Live Labs: Blog

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.

New: Seadragon Ajax

Live Labs Admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:12:00 GMT

Seadragon Ajax brings Deep Zoom technology right to your own web page or blog, even if you're not a software developer. You may already be familiar with Deep Zoom technology--it's used in Photosynth and in Silverlight. It enables you to smoothly zoom into extreme close-ups of your images, regardless of the size of the screen or bandwidth of the network you're on.

Seadragon Ajax makes it easy for you to embed Deep Zoom Images right on your site or blog. Or, you can download the free Deep Zoom Composer to create a Deep Zoom Image that you can store on your own site. See how easy it is.

Come Play in the Sandbox

Live Labs Admin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:04:00 GMT

Maybe your Web site includes maps, visit counters, affiliate programs that run scripts on your page, gadgets, or scripts from other sites. What happens if one of those elements tries running malicious code, redirecting users, installing rogue ActiveX controls or even reading users information? IFrames might help, but do they really protect the user or their machine?

The Web Sandbox addresses this problem through virtualization. We provide an opportunity to test the Sandbox and find out whether it prevents the attacks you’re concerned about. It's designed to improve the security, isolation and quality of service for your site and your users. It gives you a set of samples and lets you try to break them. As more people use the Sandbox, the better it will become as they discover scenarios and exploits that we hadn't gotten to yet. It's a truly collaborative environment that we expect will eventually lead to a robust and long-term solution to these problems. The goal is to get to an open and interoperable standard in this space. Try it.