Archive for August, 2008
August 28, 2008 at 10:05 pm ·
Filed under Games, Fun
In the category ‘this is waaay too cool to let it go by’, there’s been a fan video on YouTube from the EA Game Tiger Woods 09, where a player thought he discovered a glitch in the game by letting Tiger hit a ball from within the water. EA apparently did the homework and followed up upon the fan videos that appeared online, and they made a reply to it and posted that on YouTube. Great example of how you can go with the fan-flow and expand your brand coolness online. And the question still remains, was it a real glitch or not?
Video link
August 28, 2008 at 2:09 pm ·
Filed under Uncategorized, PR, Releases, Live Services
Yah! Today they’ve sent around some internal memos about the release of the beta file of IE8. While we’ve been playing with the Beta 2 already for a little while here, (and showed some of the features to the bloggers present on our latest event) I’m really happy about the progress that’s been made so far. And so, the IE8 B2 has been released for public browsing pleasure somewhere around 6 AM this morning. The supported languages so far are English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, and the next update will follow with another 21 languages in mid-September. You can download IE8 Beta 2 now at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.
The bottom line is that IE8 is faster, easier and safer. To get a feel for the new IE8 experience, check out the videos here, download the product, and try it out. These are a few of the cool features:
- Accelerators - Highlight an address, click the blue button and hover over “Map” or try Right Clicking a Page and Choosing Translate with Windows Live. Check out the new IE Gallery that has cool accelerators and slices from Digg to FaceBook to Ebay
- Web Slices - Visit Live Search, search for “Seattle Weather” (or major city relevant to your region), hover over the rich search result and click the green button. Click it to add a Weather Web Slice to your Favorites Bar.
- Search Suggestions - Go to your Instant Search Box (top right) and type a search to see search suggestions in action.
- Navigation - Use the new Smart Address Bar to quickly find sites you’ve visited before. The Smart Address Bar searches your history, favorites AND feeds for pages that match what you’re typing.
- Security: IE8 has the best security features in the market today from its updated Smartscreen phishing and malware filter to domain highlighting to the industry leading cross-site scripting filter so I feel my machines, my identity and my family will be safer on the Internet
There’s bunch of pretty funny virals that have been released on the innernets to promote the IE8 launch. One of my favorites is the one about the slices:
Video: The History of Slices
Check out the others too
One other really cool thing to check out is the Internet Explorer Gallery, an archive of cool and useful addons, web slices and accelerators. Definitely worth a check if you want to pimp your browser a bit.
So what are the main differences with IE7 and, for instance FireFox3?
- Out-of-the box integrated Accelerators put your favorite blog, mapping, mail, search and other services a click-away
- Built-in Privacy mode keeping you in control of what information you share and with whom, both on your PC and on the web
- Rich visual search results and instant answers from partners like Wikipedia, New York Times, and Amazon
- Intuitive tab grouping and color coding to mirror the way you browse and help organize your browsing experience
- Automatic tab-level crash recovery for uninterrupted browsing
Righty. So the only thing left for you to do is go download and experience it yourself. One thing to note: because not all sites are IE8 compatible yet, keep in mind there is a IE7 compatibility button just on the right next to the address bar. You can even add the sites you visit regularly to a list so IE8 remembers to open them in compatibility mode straight away until they’ve updated. Have fun!
August 26, 2008 at 5:20 am ·
Filed under Uncategorized, PR, Releases, Live Services, Photography
In case you missed this message, while I was in Seattle I had a little chat with one of the guys from the Virtual Earth team, and he pointed me to this recent update they’ve made of the image content of Virtual Earth. They’ve added 14.3 TerraBytes of new pictures to the database.
The Belgian cities included in this update are:
- Tournai
- Aalst
- Verviers
- Sint Niklass
- Hasselt
- Genk
- Mouscron
- Mons
- Oostende
- Mechelen
- Leuven
- Kortrijk
- La Louviere
Apart from these Belgian cities, a few dozen of other cities in other countries have been updated as well with high-quality pictures for your viewing experience. If you’d like to know more about it, check out this blog post.
August 26, 2008 at 4:34 am ·
Filed under Uncategorized, Projects, Community, Technology, Releases, Live Services, Photography
An extended post on the Virtual Earth blog informs the world of the fact that the Photosynth team has partnered with the Virtual Earth team to deliver a stunning experience of the beauty of the Synthing technology combined with the mapping features of Virtual Earth. Ever since the launch of Photosynth there’s been much discussion about the natural synergy of it and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Well, it’s now official that you can begin additional speculation on what it means that they’ve moved the Photosynth team into the Virtual Earth product group. No longer is Photosynth just a Live Labs research project - it now has full funding and backing from the Virtual Earth team. It helps a lot that they get all of the people that worked on it too. :)
After creating a Photosynth account by using your Live ID (see the slideshow below to get some help with that) it’s time for some extended steps to see the full potential of this small added feature to your online experience. If you’ve already completed the creation of your Photosynth account, skip the presentation and scroll down a bit to continue.
Sorry for the messed up graphics in the slideshow below, but SlideShare does not accept the .pptx format of Office 2007, so I had to convert it to compatibility mode and apparently those files are not very well digested by SlideShare either. You can download the Office 97-2003 compatible version here from my Windows Live Skydrive, and obviously the Office 2007 version too. (right-click the links and save targets as).
In the process of explaining how to pin your Synth on a map by using the little globe on the synth overview page, the guys from the Virtual Earth team hint one of the future options of the Photosynth technology: “The next step is best for indexing your synth into Live Search. It’s not required for integration with Virtual Earth, but in order to be able to find your synth in Live Search (future item) you’ll want take this step. Click on the globe icon next to your synth. This will bring up a Virtual Earth map consisting of a full interface and a search box for navigating to your synth’s location. You can enter an address, place or whatever in the search box and find it to zoom down to it quicker or just navigate the map down to where you want your synth to be represented. Once you get there, click the mouse on the property and a Photosynth icon will be placed on the location. Click “Save” and your synth will be geo-indexed at that location for future search capabilities.” - Cool! Searchable Synths and having them added to the search result will definitely be an advantage when researching a location or attraction!
Quoting more of the ‘how-to’ guide:
“Now the good stuff. Photosynth is awesome, but now let’s just get sick, shall we? I built the following application using a Virtual Earth map that highlights different properties on a map with pushpins. Once you hover over a pushpin, you’ll see the synth in the enhanced rollover (if you don’t have Photosynth installed it will prompt you to install it). Obviously, this is a basic demo to show the code and demonstrate the technology, but can you imagine the new real estate experience searching for homes? You can actually see the property from every single angle in high resolution pseudo 3D.”
As BNOX suggested in her tweet: imagine real estate sites using this technology to demonstrate and propose rentals and sales. That would be too cool, she said. And here we are. Already available. :)
To get the code of the small application that was coded and to combine these two technologies and to see an example, head over to this post on the Virtual Earth blog. It’s really easy to do. you can view or download the application from the creator’s SkyDrive site. Then you just have to add a column in your current database for “Synth” and paste in the URL string. Then, include the ability to read that column and suddenly you’ve got some bleeding edge technology right in your application. Coolness deluxe!
August 26, 2008 at 3:16 am ·
Filed under PR, MicroLife, Video, Projects, Community, Technology, Releases, Live Services, Photography
So, last Thursday (the 21st) we had a really cool release event over at the Microsoft building in Brussels. A handful of bloggers came to our brand new offices to participate in a Q&A session with the Photosynth team, live over video stream with a unique conceptual instant translator service, courtesy of Live Labs. I had 8 blogger slots to fill up and invited some of the most respected and most read bloggers of the country. The first hour of the event was the Q&A session, of which the recording is added below. The next part of the event was a workshop on how to start synthing for yourself, followed by a super cool sneak preview of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 by my colleague Jurgen Van Duvel. After that we had some pizzas and sodas, while some bloggers enjoyed the view and started taking pictures of our top floor to throw them in a synth later that night. After the dinner break, Ine Van Leeuw from the local Windows Live team showed off the new messengerbillboard.be website that had just been released (also in French) and to top off the goodness, I threw in a few small mobile demos of some nice apps I’ve been testing the past weeks: Guitar Hero For Windows Mobile devices and DashWire. (I’ve referred to them in an earlier post, you can check them out there). If you have a Windows Mobile enable device and you’re running the WinMobile 6 version, here is the .cab file for you to download to start enjoying the awesomeness of Guitar Hero. Obviously this is just the trial. The full version costs about 15$ and features a lot more songs and goodies.
So, enjoy the video from the event, and if you have any additional comments or questions, just email me or put them in the comments.
If you feel like you need to be part of future events at Microsoft, drop me a line in the comments too, so I can check out your blog and add you to the invitee list.
Read feeback about this event (mostly Dutch and French):
Pietel (Pieter Baert) - Twitter: Pietel
BNOX (Clo Willaerts) - Twitter: BNOX (ENG Blogpost)
Maarten Schenk + Live Stream (recorded) - Twitter: mschenk
eMich (Michaël Uyttersprot) - Twitter: eMich
LVB (Luc Van Braekel) - Twitter: LVB
BVLG (Bruno Peeters) - Twitter: BVLG
Go try the Photosynth, if you missed all the buzz, and check out the team blog to stay up to date with changes and upgrades and to learn more about the product by following the cool turorials and how-to guides!
August 25, 2008 at 5:14 pm ·
Filed under PR, Projects, Fun
Tomorrow, the second phase of the Mojave Experiment begins. In case you missed it, the Mojave Experiment is a focus group conducted to understand how customers react to Windows Vista when they have not personally used it. What they’ve done is: they’ve disguised Vista as ‘codename Mojave’, the next Operating System Microsoft would be working on. You can see the results in small video snippets on the dedicated website.
To many people’s disappointment, the site was made in Adobe’s Flash technology. Obviously things would’ve been waaaaay better if they were done in Silverlight, which is why the team made the decision to update the Mojave Experiment Web site for the second part of the campaign with Silverlight technology, a features demo, additional videos and frequently asked questions. Advertisements will begin airing on U.S. cable stations in the coming week.
August 25, 2008 at 5:01 pm ·
Filed under Fun
The third week of the GotW show. There’s too much cubicle humor out there to ignore it all, so I’ll line up the best one of the week, every week again :) What better way to kick off a Monday than with a comical graph made in Microsoft Office Excel?
Source: GraphJam - Pop Culture for People in Cubicles
August 21, 2008 at 5:58 am ·
Filed under PR, Community, Technology, Releases, Live Services, Photography, WoW, Digital Life
So. It’s been a well-kept secret under a super strict NDA (non disclosure agreement) that was actively maintained and sometimes enforced, but at last we’re free to talk. The past weeks have been filled with planning, synthing and conference calls, testing until late at night and biting knuckles because we weren’t allowed to say anything. But it’s out. The big secret can be shared.
And here goes: welcome to Photosynth! Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience that fills in all of these promises.
Whether it’s a quiet creek in the woods of Pennsylvania, or the grandeur of the interior of St Paul’s cathedral, Photosynth puts you there like nothing else can. Check out the synths I made from the Stitch event in Amsterdam, where a few miles of the Keizersgracht (the main canal) have been captured by a bunch of really enthusiastic photographers. Notice how the software is smart enough to realize that the boat made a smooth curve to follow the canal border, and how all the matched points line out the contours of the pictures to come.
(click image for large view)
Check out this synth from the municipal museum of the city of Lier, and take a virtual tour through a collection of fine arts from between the 16th and the 20th century. And yes, as you can see, all the collections you make on the site are turned into an embedable iframe, which makes your experience portable. How neat is that? By the way, thanks you to Peter Hallemans for freeing up the time to go out and shoot all of these 200+ images to create this virtual walk. Really appreciate the effort!
The navigation you see in the top right corner works like this
(starting on the top):
You can switch between grid view (all images in a grid) and 3D view (what you see already). Next to it is a button to hop over to the next group of pictures in the synth (e.g. another room linked in the whole synth in this case). Below that you can zoom in with the + or zoom out with the minus (also works by scrolling the mouse wheel). Below that you can browse picture per picture in a set, and the lowest button is a sort of animated slide show, a tour that takes you through a set in the synth).
So, how does all of this work? Well, it’s pretty simple. Getting started with Photosynth is easy:
- To begin, just take a few dozen digital photos — 20 to 300 photos are required, depending on the size of the place or object — with overlap between each shot, from a number of locations and angles.
- Next, download a small, free software application to your computer from http://photosynth.com. This software works in concert with the Photosynth Web site, which is also a free service.
- Build your synth in just two easy steps: First, from the Photosynth Web site, click on Create and select the pictures you want to use. Then, give your creation a name and click on Synth, and Photosynth automatically creates and uploads your synth. In about the same amount of time it would take to upload the pictures to a photo-sharing site, you can enjoy your pictures in dramatic and detailed 3-D.
- The finished synth can be accessed from any Windows XP- or Windows Vista-powered computer with a broadband connection. If you want to comment on other people’s synths or create your own, you’ll also need a free Windows Live ID.
- Once created, synths can also be embedded on Web sites, blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace, Windows Live Spaces or virtually any Web site where HTML can be edited.
The best thing to do to create a really good synth is to put yourself in the center of the space you want to capture and to take as many pictures as you can whilst moving in a circular motion, gradually shifting the camera to the left or right, making sure you have more than enough overlap so the software can recognize the common items and link them to each other. If you want close ups of objects, make sure you zoom and click gradually, so the link with the surrounding environment is not broken and the software can connect everything.
Other cool features lined up:
- Obviously you can tag your synth with as many accurate tags as you wish, so they can be searched and linked to other collections that might correspond.
- You can rename a synth after it has been uploaded and add a description to it that tells the story of what you captured.
- The little globe in the menu on the Photosynth site allows you to pinpoint the location of the synth on a map.
- You can embed the synth on a web page or in a blog, and share it by sending the generated URL to your friends.
- You can lift the synth out of the site and open it full screen, maximizing your exploring adventure.
- You can comment on synths of yourself or those of others.
Following this release, the Photosynth team will join MSN — an important step in continuing to improve Photosynth and share the experience with an even wider audience. In addition to letting users create and share synths at http://photosynth.com, over the next year Photosynth will begin to become a key part of the experience for MSN’s 550 million monthly visitors worldwide. Synths will be prominently featured on MSN.com. To create a more absorbing experience for its visitors, MSN will use synths of popular destinations and notable events in many of the places where static images are used on the site today.
In a nutshell:
- Share experiences. Think about the times you have been in the midst of a beautiful location or having a once-in-a-lifetime experience and wished you could share it with more immediacy and sense of place than still photos or video can capture. Photosynth puts viewers in the center of the moment and in control of how they experience it.
- Tell a story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a synth composed of 20 or 50 photos makes visual storytelling as rich and compelling as a short story. Synths capture the totality of important moments in time, such as the anticipation and joy of an entire wedding party and guests at the moment vows are exchanged, or the elation of a child scoring a winning soccer goal as the fans cheer.
- Form a community. Synths can bring the best of your digital photos together with the best of everybody else’s. Imagine if you took a trip to Rome with your friends and each of you took photos of the Trevi Fountain. Later, you can tag and upload all of the photos from each person’s camera to create a synth of it. In addition, you can share that experience and your favorite places with others by embedding the synth in your profile on a social networking site.
- Educate or archive. If you want to re-create how you decorated your home for the holidays or how you planted your garden last season, the ability of Photosynth to provide intricate detail allows documentation impossible to achieve with conventional photos.
August 19, 2008 at 10:13 pm ·
Filed under Video, Projects, Technology, Releases, Photography
Boy oh boy, seems like the main focus these last days is really photography oriented. Here’s another goodie that rolled out of the stables of Microsoft Research: AutoCollage. Researchers from all disciplines and the Cambridge Incubation team worked together, building Digital Tapestry and AutoCollage research into a new product. Face detection, saliency filters, and other Microsoft research identifies interesting parts of pictures. Advanced object selection and blending technologies seamlessly combine these pieces into a beautiful new AutoCollage.
So, I can see you thinking ‘wtf?’ and that is why there is some more information. /wink
AutoCollage is an automatic procedure for constructing a visually appealing collage from a collection of input images. The aim is that the resulting collage should be representative of the collection, summarising its main themes. It is also assembled largely seamlessly, using graph-cut, Poisson blending of alpha-masks, to hide the joins between input images. This work makes several new contributions. Firstly, it shows how energy terms can be included that:
- encourage the selection of a representative set of images;
- that are sensitive to particular object classes;
- that encourage a spatially efficient and seamless layout.
Secondly the resulting optimization poses a search problem that, on the face of it, is computationally infeasible. Rather than attempt an expensive, integrated optimization procedure, a sequence of optimization steps has been developed, from static ranking of images, through region of interest optimization, optimal packing by constraint satisfaction, and lastly graph-cut alpha-expansion.
In a nutshell: you take a bunch of pictures [a folder] select all of them and let the tool make a collage from it. if you shrink that, you can use it as a dvd cover sheet, or you can print it and put it with the CDs so you know which pictures are on it. Visually.
I’ve reported on this late last year, while I had the chance to talk to the guys of MS Research who were working on this concept, but then for video instead of photographs. Check out that clip:
Video: Video Collage
Check out some examples on the MS Research site and on the MSR Cambridge page
The link to the product site will require you to activate an ActiveX add-on, Windows Meda Player extension. Just so you know that the site isn’t broken. It just waits for you to confirm ;-)
August 18, 2008 at 9:49 pm ·
Filed under Fun
Do you feel like it’s time to seriously pimp your avatar image and come up with something really cool and easy to make? Join the 1-2-3 creation process of FaceYourManga, and turn yourself into a super funky manga character. Suits really fine as
I look like this:
What’s your manga face?
Kudos to MinorIssues
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