The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Today in Redmond I attended Microsoft’s TechFest 2007, where people from Microsoft Research show off what they’ve been working on to a bunch of other Microsoft employees. I only had about 45 minutes between meetings to cruise through and see a few things. As an employee, I am under NDA regarding most of the stuff I saw, but thankfully this is not thing is not since it was briefly written about in the Seattle PI: Surface Computing.  

While walking around TechFest, I saw a table with folded pieces of paper on it, a couple of XBox game controllers, and a projector above it. There were little toy cars being projected onto the table, so I figured the game controllers must be for controlling them. Sorta like a table-top video game, but without a TV – just paper on a table. The photo shows what I saw.

There were a couple people around the table just talking, so I was about to grab the game controller to see if I could make the projected cars drive around. But as I got closer, the two guys picked up the controllers and started playing. One of them was Andy Wilson on the left in this photo and the other was Bill Gates. I’ve been at Microsoft long enough that I’ve had other encounters with Bill, but this was different. The 3 of us stood there chatting about this invention as we would move the pieces of paper around to change the landscape of the game. Just like the guy in the photo has his hand on the table; so did I while I had Bill drive his electronic car up my arm. It’s difficult to explain, but basically we were playing and talking about interacting with the technology. It was fun to stand there talking to Bill about a piece of technology that we were both interested in.

After a few minutes though, Bill and Andy got into the details of the technology and sort of lost me. That’s no surprise given that Andy has a PhD from MIT and Bill Gates, is well, he’s Bill Gates.

To see more of what was at TechFest, go to http://research.microsoft.com/techfest/ and see these articles:

• Microsoft’s gadgets of the future get their day in the limelight
• At TechFest, Microsoft gives everyday objects a tech makeover
• Microsoft TechFest: Top R&D, From Deeply Geeky to Cute and Fuzzy
• Microsoft looks beyond search
• Microsoft developing Xbox game to teach programming
• Want To Buy Some Cool New Stuff From Microsoft? Not This Stuff, Not Yet
• Microsoft Researchers Look to the Future of Search
• Outsiders get first peek at Microsoft’s TechFest