Archive for November, 2007
November 22, 2007 at 10:21 am ·
Filed under Video, Technology
Michael from Microsoft Research pointed me to a project they’ve been doing with the university of Washington. Key people involved in this research project are: Jue Wang, Pravin Bhat, Alex Colburn, Maneesh Agrawala and Michael Cohen. What they’ve been creating in fact is an interactive system for efficiently extracting foreground objects from a video. They extended previous min-cut based image segmentation techniques to the domain of video with four new contributions.
- A novel painting-based user interface that allows users to easily indicate the foreground object across space and time.
- A hierarchical mean-shift preprocess in order to minimize the number of nodes that min-cut must operate on.
- Within the min-cut they defined a new local cost functions to augment the global costs defined in earlier work.
- Finally, they’ve extended 2D alpha matting methods designed for images to work with 3D video volumes.
Video: Interactive Video Cutout
We demonstrate that our matting approach preserves smoothness across both space and time. Our interactive video cutout system allows users to quickly extract foreground objects from video sequences for use in a variety of applications including compositing onto new backgrounds and NPR cartoon style rendering.
Download the paper (58Mb, .pdf)
Download the video (37Mb, DivX)
November 21, 2007 at 10:04 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Games, Community
Coming up next on November 29th, which is next week: Are you a student, academic or an independent games developer interested in learning how to build great video games for either Microsoft Windows or the Xbox 360 console? Would you like to be one of the first to see the all new version of Microsoft XNA Game Studio before it releases later this year? Want to discover just how easy it is to build a game with XNA Game Studio in just 60 minutes and get to grips with the XNA Framework and the disciplines of games development? Then the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 is a not to be missed event, visiting seven different countries and bringing together top speakers from the Microsoft XNA product group in the US, local Microsoft speakers as well as experts from the games industry. Microsoft XNA Game Studio is the revolutionary tool that makes it easy to develop video games for Windows and Xbox 360. So whether you’re an experienced games developer or a total newbie, sign up for the XNA Game Studio European Tour to build the games of your dreams.
Session Abstracts
- Keynote: The Ongoing Democratization of Game Development
Dave Mitchell, Director, Microsoft XNA, Microsoft Corporation
Join Dave Mitchell from the Microsoft XNA organization as he shares Microsoft’s plans to democratize game development beyond the initial XNA Game Studio Express offering. As the video game industry is reaching a critical juncture in its growth as a mainstream entertainment form, consumers are becoming an increasingly important partner in the creation of innovative, fun gameplay experiences which compliment commercially released titles. This keynote will share the next instalment of the XNA vision to further democratize game development by the community.
- Diving in to XNA Game Studio 2.0 and the XNA Framework
Dave Mitchell, Director, Microsoft XNA, Microsoft Corporation &
Charles Cox, Developer Educator, Microsoft XNA, Microsoft Corporation
XNA Game Studio 2.0 is the highly anticipated new release of a revolutionary game development tool that gives hobbyist, academic and indie game programmers a chance to develop and share their own games on Windows and Xbox 360. This demo-heavy session will take a closer look at what is new in 2.0 including the newly-added networking libraries based on Xbox LIVE, support for Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Professional and Team editions, new multiplayer starter kits, samples and more.
- Building a Game in 60 Minutes with XNA Game Studio 2.0
Charles Cox, Developer Educator, Microsoft XNA, Microsoft Corporation
During this live session we put XNA Game Studio 2.0 to the test and build a fully-realized casual game running on an Xbox 360 in just sixty minutes. Whether you are a seasoned games coder or a programmer thinking of moving into game development, this demo-packed session will give you plenty of food for thought and the information to get you started.
More info:
Chez Walter Stiers
Sign Up for this event
The Agent (deep dive)
November 21, 2007 at 9:37 pm ·
Filed under Video, WoW
I just couldn’t think of any other word but ‘WoW’ when I saw these guys going at it in the center court. Jeez. What a masterpiece of coordination and guts…
Video: Super Cool Bastketball Tricks
November 12, 2007 at 3:25 pm ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Photography
One of the cool things I started playing with recently is the HD View, a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images. Recent advances in camera and sensor technology and software for stitching images together has led to the creation of images containing billions of pixels (gigapixels). These images are often panoramic, that is, they cover very wide fields of view. Since monitors typically contain only one to two million pixels, it is only possible to actually see 1/1000th of such image data at once. Also, viewing very wide fields of view require unwrapping of an image projected onto a curved surface (think of a map of the world) which can cause distortions.
HD View was developed with a number of goals in mind. It should:
- allow smooth panning and zooming on large images,
- only download enough data to create the current view (and possibly look ahead to the next), and
- always display the current field of view with an appropriate projection. This means that when zoomed way in you should be presented with a standard perspective projection providing a sense of immersion, and when zoomed out you experience a curved projection so that get a full overview of the scene. In between the projection should smoothly transition.
- Finally, it should be easy to create your own HD View content and present it to the world via the web.
You can find the tool to help you create your own HD Views at the MS Research Center (available for download)
To be able to view the HD pictures, you need to install a client. The IE client can be found here. If you’re a Firefox lover, direct your digital self to this link.
Check out this cool stuff in action on the XREZ site.
November 12, 2007 at 2:53 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
On December 4th, there’s another event I’m attending. This one’s in Brussels and it’s the European Innovation Day. The speakers that day are pretty impressive because they include Commissioner Reding and Vice President of the European Commission, Commissioner Frattini, the Portuguese (holder of the rotating EU Presidency) Minister of Economy and Innovation, Mr Pinho, as well as Jean Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International and Robbie Bach President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices. I’m pretty thrilled I can be part of this day.
I’ll be showcasing either Silverlight or the Windows Home Server setup, depending on which booth needs me the most. The venue address is Parc du cinquantenaire, 1000 Brussels (Microsoft’s European Business Center, where most press briefings are given)
Those of you who wish to attend, please confirm your participation by registering on the site.
Government leaders, academic and industry stakeholders, and the media, will be given a sneak preview of the technologies of tomorrow. The event will house an exhibition looking at the digital future from a consumer perspective, spanning Microsoft’s future technology and newly developed prototypes in their early development stage. There will also be a small sample of our many partners who collaborate with us in the areas of banking, retail, health, government and the home. This event is an important policy forum to exchange ideas and have an open debate.
Innovation Day is also an occasion for our research labs to showcase their role in cultivating research talent across Europe. The researchers of today and tomorrow will join us at Innovation Day to explain their collaborations with Microsoft Research and demonstrate their innovative technologies and results.
Come to Innovation Day 2007 to experience the power of innovation, see the technology of the future, and understand how innovation is accelerating growth in Europe.
November 12, 2007 at 2:12 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
Coming up next: Inspiration Week Live in the last week of November. Well, actually from November 26th to December 2nd, I’ll be traveling back and forth between Brussels and The Hague. Together with Serge Van Schie from the Dutch DPE team and a bunch of other Microsoft people from the sub, we’ll be demoing all week long the coolest stuff we have. Some of it is public, some of it is still in the early phase of development and purely there for showcasing purposes. The audience is around 1000 people large, and I’ll try to deliver a few cool experiences. Amongst the wicked things we’ll do:
Trying to create the world’s largest PhotoStitch, making a PhotoSynth of a building of the Mesdag museum, setting up a pretty cool ‘Inspiration Walk’ to challenge people to push the borders of their imagination and lots, lots, lots of other things.
Check out the cool website for an archive of inspiring ideas that have been posted there by enthusiast thinkers. Some of these ideas really do have a lot of potential.
November 12, 2007 at 1:59 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
On December 5th I’m invited to join a panel of very respectable people on a conference in Romania. Anyone who’s in that area, feel free to ping me. Netcamp is a premier event featuring a series of presentations and discussions about the global world of internet - its implications, opportunities and risks. We witness a new and interesting context as the online medium offers us more choices, an increasingly personalized living and even more interesting business opportunities. We are just discovering a new world ahead of us - join us for an interesting journey in exploring and learning about ideas, practices, people and trends!
NetCamp is the first event in Romania aiming to explore the new business context and opportunities that we are facing within the internet landscape.
This context involves new applications, new consumer behaviors and expectations, new business opportunities and new infrastructure needs - a whole new set of variables opening a new paradigm.
For that we have invited a seasoned panel of international speakers ready to share with us their experiences and to explore new innovation and money-making avenues.
TOPICS
The event will cover different principles related to internet, business development and marketing such as:
• User generated content
• The social web
• Communities
• New economic models
• Blogs and wikis
• New media
• Measurability - audience, traffic, return on investment
• Challenges & Issues
• Best Practice
