Microsoft News Tracker

Last week Microsoft Research held the 2008 edition of their annual Faculty Summit in Redmond complete with the release of free academic-flavored software tools and demos of Microsoft Research and faculty research projects. The biggest buzz was over the multi-touch Sphere display which uses a refinement of Microsoft’s Surface technology, but frankly it seems mostly useful as a prop for the villain in the next James Bond movie.

Looking over the full list of demo projects yields a number of others which are more likely to be of real utility including the following for "touch" fans which appeal to my prejudice that I don’t want my screen smudged up, thanks.

The UnMousePad
Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin present the UnMousePad, a paper thin, flexible multi-touch device about size of a mouse pad. The UnMousePad not only continuously detects a multitude of touches, it also senses varying levels of pressure at a resolution high enough to distinguish multiple fingertips and even the tip of a pen or pencil. Because of its form-factor, it can be used for simple mouse input, for multi-touch gestures, or for a wide variety of interactive applications, such as games, 3D sculpting, 6DOF object manipulation, musical instruments, and interactive control of synthesized human voice.

LucidTouch
LucidTouch is a new type of touch screen device. It prevents the user’s fingers from occluding screen contents by allowing users to interact with the backside of the device, yet providing visual control by means of "pseudo-transparency." The benefit of this approach is that it allows making very small touch devices, which is not possible with traditional touch screen technology.

When I starting reading the latter description I thought it implied worse contortions than the average desktop touch screen, but for small devices it seems interesting, not to mention novel. Here’s more (including videos) on both the UnMousePad and the LucidTouch.

Nothing livens up the dog days of summer like a rumor and Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica has a good one about Microsoft cutting Xbox 360 prices in September. The net is that the rumored price cuts are:

• Arcade (no hard drive) cut from $279 to $199
• Pro (60GB) from $349 to $299 
• Elite (120GB) from $449 to $399

Last month, Microsoft replaced the 20GB Xbox 360 with the current 60GB model at the same price and Kuchera says his source more or less called that one correctly. Meanwhile, VGChartz claims to have separate confirmation of the Arcade price cut so maybe it will all come to pass in time to inspire visions of Xboxs dancing in the heads of gamers for the holiday season.

Assuming the price cuts happen, there is speculation as to whether Xbox 360 hardware cost reductions prompted the cuts, but Microsoft isn’t saying and that is not really a supportable reason for the perennially penurious Entertainment and Devices division to leave money on the table. I’m sure the currently weak sales of the Xbox 360 are a much better motivation.

While we are on the subject of the Xbox, Microsoft announced a mini-coup at the E3 gaming conference with the revelation that Final Fantasy, the longtime stalwart Sony PlayStation series, was coming to the Xbox 360 with the release of Final Fantasy XIII. That’s true enough, but now it turns out that work hasn’t even started since developer Square Enix hasn’t received Xbox development kits and in any case, the PS3 version will ship at the same time.