Last week we (Microsoft Finland) had a kick-off event for our local partners (we called it "Challenge").

I was tasked to gather a collection of research work that we could show as an example of things that Microsoft does beyond the currently shipping products. And I mean really projects that Microsoft Research does that are in the very early stages of research, not necessarily very near of the productization phase (which is, in one way or the other, also usually one goal).

Ok, these were the projects that we finally demoed in our "Future" booth:

Photosynth, a system that automatically produces an interactive 3D view of static 2D pictures. Not yet publically available but very very impressive. We had the pleasure of showing it live in its prerelease form. Check out the site, it has a couple of good videos that explain the idea very well. Here are a couple of screenshots of San Marco in Venice:

Group Shot, an application that allows anyone to produce quality group shots. The idea is that you take multiple shots of a group of people and then combine the best view of each individual and produce a composite image. This is a very handy and easy to use application in it's current version already and anyone can play with it (downloadable from the site). Here are a couple of screenshots:

Patchworks, an algorithm that is developed for removing graphical elements from digital photographs. The site contains a few samples of the end result. The previous version of the algorithm is tech-transferred and a feature in Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 Editor (called Smart Erase).

ConferenceXP is a video conferencing system designed to work well in high-bandwidth, multicast-enabled networks such as Internet2. It is already in production at several universities allowing multisite learning between universities. Version 4.0 (in beta currently) is based on .NET Framework 2.0. Previous releases are built on top of .NET Framework 1.1.

F# is a .NET-based programming language experimenting with features like interactive scripting and dynamic languages. You can install it and get going, Visual Studio 2003/2005 supported but not necessary.

Windows Mobile was one topic also, although it is not "Future" in any other sense than it being a future thing in Finland (we have a very low presence of Windows Mobile devices currently). We had HTC TyTN, MTeoR and Qtek 8500 as examples of new devices based on Windows Mobile 5.0.

Photosynth and Group Shot gathered the most interest along with the mobile devices. From the projects only the devices and Digital Image Suite are the only ones that we actually sell, the others are research projects that are mostly available for free for academic use (see each individual project home page for more information).