Craig Mundie, research Chief at Microsoft, painted a vision of the direction of interfaces, cloud computing, and immersive worlds at the EmTech08 conference at MIT last week, according to SearchCIO.
In this view, the future of computing will be about computerizing the physical environment – think a mash-up between Bill Gate’s Seattle house, I guess, PhotoSynth, and Minority Report.
“If we are to realize the potential that a combination of local and remote computing offers us. The next computing evolution, he said, will be defined by multi-core processing and parallel programming; it will be context-aware, model-based, personalized, humanistic, adaptive, immersive, 3-D and it will use speech, vision and gestures. The new “spatial Web” will interact with the user’s physical world to further blur distinctions between the physical and virtual worlds to provide an enhanced reality.”
PhotoSynth, about which I’ve written before, gives a hint of how virtual/3D spaces can be created to “fashion a “First Life” reality where users shuttle between virtual and physical environments to do all sorts of things.”
Mundie sees future mash-ups between this sort of technology and the MS Surfaces ‘touch’ interfaces:
“In a demo…Mundie regaled the audience with a gee-whiz exercise involving tracking down a piece of Eskimo art he had admired in a “physical” magazine in an airport newsstand. The journey progressed from snapping a photo of the magazine cover with his smartphone, placing the smartphone on a hotel surface technology table to retrieve an online copy of the magazine and from there taking a virtual tour of the Seattle gallery where the piece was on display. The audience watched as Mundie, a collector of Pacific Northwest art, conferred virtually with wife Marie on the artwork’s merits, spinning the piece virtually to see it from all angles and even chatting online with the artist, before deciding to make arrangements (including a lunch reservation and taxi) to view the coveted item in person.”
PC World, reporting on the same presentation, picks up Microsoft’s dismissive comments about Second Life and that pesky user-generated content stuff:
“Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D “parallel universe” modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. “Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with,” Mundie said. “Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space.”
Um…construction of avatars? Enamored? Like we’re enamored of Microsoft’s Vista I suppose. And if they’re so ambivalent about user-generated content, why are they supporting a competitor to Google’s Sketch Up?
Regardless, Microsoft’s involvement in the OpenSim project, and their advocacy for using virtual worlds for meeting and collaborating, a ‘virtual world’ on the X-Box platform (OK, well, avatars anyways), and their work with Calligari and 3DVIA, clearly put Microsoft as an emerging player in the 3D Internet space.
Dusan: I agree that MSFT has some interesting things going on with regard to immersive technology. My take: don’t expect Microsoft’s information worker division to aggressively embrace the Immersive Internet. Rather, this division is likely to sit back for a while to see how the Immersive Internet develops, and then get in the game. For information workers, Microsoft may move in the direction of integrating Virtual Earth with the company’s collaboration and social computing products. Virtual Earth already integrates with Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 for business data visualization. Imagine if: Microsoft went further and Virtual Earth was integrated with Outlook and Exchange Server and Office Communicator and Communications Server so you could zoom in on any address in your contacts database or buddy list, or in an email signature, and get directions and a 3D image of the location. Take it even further and picture yourself inviting a professional contact to come and meet you in the virtual park outside your virtual office in Virtual Earth, where your avatars sit on a bench together while you IM or talk via voice about, say, an upcoming business trip. Give it five years and this style of communication and collaboration will be commonplace. And Microsoft will likely be one of the vendors delivering it. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about this in July titled “My take on Microsoft’s Immersive Internet play for information workers” (http://tinyurl.com/56p6pf).
Erica Driver, Principal, ThinkBalm
It’s really hard to hold my tongue with regards to any notion of Microsoft being a top leader in any innovative new segment of the computing industry, frankly. They talk the talk, but rarely do they walk the walk with anything outside of what they’ve been doing for the last thousand years.
The people who really get how 3d will/should be used won’t be the mainstay computer OS types, IMO. A lot of the scenarios for 3d business use are too “weighty”… honestly, I can’t log into SL for less than 20 minutes. You have a load a program, log in… get the whole IM and notice thing… it just takes too long. If 3d really has a place in business software (and I’m not sure it’s not a case of everything looking like a nail) it needs to be lightweight and quick to use. Not something you have to feel like you’re logging into.
It’s a hard distinction to express in an understandable way, but it’s like the difference between logging into SL and getting something done vs. using twitter or blogging something real quick. The barrier to jumping into SL to do something quick is higher just because of the minimum time involved.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Microsoft is starting to put together a cohesive story about the immersive internet. The vision described above pulls together threads that have been in the works for over a decade. With an incredibly strong background in games, MMOs, cartography, very large databases, scale-out server farms, avatars (Microsoft Agent, the infamous “clippy”, game charaters, etc.), smart music composition (Microsoft Music Producer), social networking (much of this in MSR Labs), streaming media on a large scale, face recognition, lip-reading, haptic interfaces, flight simulators, train simulators, extraction of 3D information from 2D phtography, high performance computing (parallel computing), mobile interfaces, voice recognition, VoIP, robotics, scripting languages, and software development & packaging, they’re pretty well situated to deliver a comprehensive solution.
There’s another interesting interview with Craig Mundie by the Wharton School at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2060
It doesn’t mention that Microsoft is getting into virtual worlds, but does emphasis the focus on long-term investments and tapping into the research labs.