Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Friday, March 16, 2012
Microsoft Research Team Developed FAR Technology
Microsoft wants to help you sword fight without the physical risks of getting stabbed. The company’s solution? A team at Microsoft Research has created a hardware localization technology that enables you to play a multi-player sword fighting game using only smartphones.
No, you won’t need to attach any crazy lasers or peripheral accessories to make it work. The team’s aptly named SwordFight game requires only the existing hardware in most shipping smartphones. But it’s also not quite as simple as an app like Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel.
“There’s a lot of technology now that allows phones to connect. But if you want to enable games that have a more active flavor, then you need more,” Thomas Moscibroda, a Lead Researcher in the Mobile & Sensing Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia, told Wired. “What you need is a technology that allows mobile devices to localize each other. If I move, I need to know how close your phone is next to me.”
Moscibroda and his colleagues on the Microsoft Research team have developed a technology called FAR. It’s a new sound-ranging scheme that makes it possible for a smartphone to locate another smartphone by measuring sound. One phone sends out a chirp, and a second phone determines the distance and the position of the first phone by measuring the time it takes for the chirp to travel to its speaker.
In SwordFight, two players aim their phones toward each other, and try to jab at the other person’s handset. When one player’s phone strikes within 15 centimeters of the other player’s phone, the second player loses a point. It’s as if there are imaginary swords, albeit very tiny ones, jutting out from each device. With the help of a phone’s accelerometer and digital compass, the game can tell which opponent did the striking. But what’s unique is the fact that the phones can know how close they are to one another.
The process of measuring distance with sound is nothing new. But the Microsoft team created faster, more accurate algorithms built on top of the core processing principles. Traditional techniques can take about one second to turn around a measurement, David Chu, one of the Microsoft researchers on the SwordFight project told us. But in that one second, a person can move his arms up to 4 meters.
“If you think about the fact that you could only take one measurement per second, you could have an error of 4 meters. We’ve been able to improve that, so that we can go 12 samples per second and theoretically up to 22 samples per second,” Chu said. “On average, based on our testing, we can actually achieve within 2-centimeter accuracy.”
In essence, the technology is incredibly fast, allowing users to play an interactive, phone-to-phone game in real time. But it isn’t limited to just a silly sword fighting game. The researchers were first inspired to create this localization technology to make games more interactive, but they see other potential applications.
“Overall, there’s really a broad applicability to it. We’re not simply talking about phones. A fundamental part of the research that we’ve done is not tied to any particular operating system or anything like that,” Chu said.
All a device needs to use the FAR technology is a speaker and a microphone — components that the vast majority of modern-day tablets, PCs and phones come with.
Unfortunately, you won’t get these capabilities on your phone anytime soon. In theory, SwordFight could be released as an app on Windows Phone or other platforms, but the Microsoft Research team has no current plans to release FAR or its SwordFight game to the general public.
The technology still faces challenges. For example, the chirping noises the phone sends are very noticeable, because smartphone mics and speakers only support audible frequency range. (One solution is to make the chirps part of a game’s music.) Another challenge: Users can easily block their mics or speakers, causing inaccurate measurements.
Moscibroda, Chu and the rest of the Microsoft Research team plan on further developing the technology to address these issues and create more prototype games and applications. They’ve already created another game called ChaseCat, which uses the same technology to let you play a two-player running game where one person attempts to get within a certain distance of another user to score points.
“We’ve seen some other developers taking the underlying technology in a completely different direction than what we had thought of,” Chu said. “We think there is a healthy amount of uses in gaming and outside.”
Monday, March 12, 2012
Microsoft Will Sell Millions of Surface Tablets
If Surface is to be a hit, Microsoft can’t just position it as yet another iPad or Android competitor. It needs people to think of the Surface as a real mobile computer. It needs people to buy Surfaces instead of laptops. That means competing with its traditional partners like HP, Dell and Acer. Not only is this Microsoft’s best play, there’s not even a downside to it.
The Surface Pro (and to a lesser extent the Surface RT) is clearly a laptop competitor that’s going to cannibalize sales from Microsoft’s traditional hardware partners. But so what? Who cares if Dell or HP or Acer gets pissed off? What are they going to do, sell only Chromebooks? Go all in on Linux boxes? Exit the PC business altogether? HP’s promise to do just that turned out to be tellingly empty.Sure, Microsoft needs its manufacturing partners. But those partners need Microsoft far more.
And then there are tablets. Microsoft isn’t even close to being a player in the tablet business, which is dominated by Apple and Android. (And, in all reality, Android is but a twee little sideshow relative to the iPad.) Many of Microsoft’s desktop partners have gone full-tilt toward Android tablets, so they’re already competing with Microsoft. So Microsoft’s best bet is to prove there’s a market in Windows tablets — which shouldn’t be hard given how abysmal Android tablets are.
Which brings us to phones. Ballmer left the door open to Microsoft rolling out its own phones. Windows Phone 7 has been a commercial failure, despite its UI being a critical darling. These phones just aren’t selling. Microsoft’s big mobile partner is Nokia, and Nokia is a wreck. Its flagship Lumia line has gone nowhere. HTC and Samsung, meanwhile, seem far more focused on Android. So if handset manufacturers and carriers can’t gin up any excitement over Windows Phone, Microsoft has to do that itself. And one clear path to this would be for Microsoft to release its own device.
In the weeks before it announced Surface, Microsoft’s hardware manager Ben Reed was on the pitch circuit talking to reporters. The meetings were odd — puzzling even — as he didn’t have any news to share. Instead, Reed spent an hour talking about Microsoft’s 30-year history in the hardware business, complete with hoary old mice. In retrospect, Reed was priming the pump, doing the groundwork for the Surface launch to plant an idea: Microsoft is a hardware company.
And if Microsoft is going to be a hardware company, it needs to be a hardware company. Microsoft’s biggest consumer success over the past decade has been Xbox. It needs to replicate that success, and the only way it can be assured of doing that, at least in the short term, is to screw its hardware partners. There’s no shame in that. It’s just business.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite
Good: excellent selection of games, including many only 360-playing all games are in the original high-definition; user-friendly Dashboard interface; supports wireless controllers and accessories; The Xbox Live service offers online multiplayer (with matchmaking and voice chat) and content downloads for most games; backward compatible with many--but not all--of the Xbox original titles; doubles as a superior digital media hub and Windows Media extender; Online Marketplace allows easy purchases of minigames, add-on gaming content, high-def movies and tv programs.
Evil: The Elite fails to
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