Engadget recently announced that the Microsoft Touch Mouse was given the 2011 readers' choice award for best peripheral. Nice! Here's a story that was posted on research.microsoft.com about the touch mouse a while back. Ah, the memories. Touch mouse...

The CID Team worked on the touch tracking and gesture recognizer for the Microsoft Touch Mouse. This was based upon the research done for the Mouse 2.0 project by Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Hardware Team, including the Applied Sciences group...

Hard to believe it's been two years since I posted! I expect to be writing more regularly moving forward. Not that the bar is very high at this point :) Over the past few years I've helped write a few papers related to distributed virtual environments...

I tripped across the daedalus project this morning while I was looking for player statistics for World of Warcraft. What a great site! The author, Nick Yee, has apparently been doing user surveys to MMOG players for years, and compiling various articles...

Jon Crowcroft pointed me at an extremely interesting talk by Dan Ariely on Cheating . Take a peek if you're interested in cheating and cheater behavior, especially as influenced by group dynamics, it'll be 15 minutes well spent.

A recent paper by Matteo Varvello et. al. answers a lot of the questions I've found myself asking about Second Life and its community. The paper Is There Life In Second Life? and if you're interested in Second Life's popularity, community, and performance...

I work on an incubation team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Today we released our first public offering, AutoCollage. In a nutshell, AutoCollage lets you select a folder containing images, and creates a collage synthesized from interesting bits...

Yesterday I was forwarded a link about retirement of a long-time player from World of Warcraft. While that in itself might be interesting, the really juicy bit was the way he went out: with a mighty 'crash' from the server. Scalability issues, or something...

Much of my last year has been spent reading about distributed virtual environment scalability. As it turns out, perhaps it shouldn't have been. A lot of research papers I've read begins like this: "DVE's consume loads of bandwidth, and there...

In the previous post I parrotted scalability figures for World of Warcraft. While investigating DVE's, I tripped across interesting figures for WoW and several other environments. Halo-3 From this press release , we can see that in the first week...

The holidays gave me a chance to re-acquaint myself with World of Warcraft (WoW). I have to say, it's still the single most impressive online game I've ever seen. For my money, it does everything right. It literally *is* for my money, since I'm one of...

If I could go back 30 years, I would tell myself to focus on the content and intention of each message, rather than its form. I'm struggling through a technical report describing application of Bayesian techniques to a particular problem. Like papers...

When I talk to people about P2P content distribution, there's a common misperception. They assume that the more people there are downloading that file, the faster download goes. This isn't usually true, as I'll explain below. What is true is that a peer...

MSCD has a front-page story on research.microsoft.com . A friend of mine asked me about a quote in the article which could perhaps be misunderstood: “It is as much as eight times faster than our original managed prototype, and it’s great that customers...

If you're interested in using Microsoft Secure Content Distribution to download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, just click here , install and run the downloader, and you'll be off and running! This version of MSCD will be available for four weeks, so you have...

A few years ago, Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis applied Network Coding to Peer-to-Peer file swarming, calling their system 'Avalanche' . I was lucky enough to be involved in their project. Over time, Cambridge Incubation at Microsoft Research...

Earlier I commented about the disparity in numbers quoted for Second Life's population. It's not that any of the numbers are wrong - for what's being expressed, they're no doubt correct. Rather, it's a question of what's being measured. For my money,...

A while back I read a news article pointing out an issue largely overlooked, namely the transience of digital data. For thousands of years, institutional and personal memory were stored solely in physical written form, on paper, papyrus, wax, stone...

Over the years I've gained a healthy respect for the value of simulation. Abstract algorithm simulation can help you fine-tune your core concepts and transaction structure. Low-level network simulation can give you a controlled environment in which to...

I recently had a very interesting experience with SCHANNEL , in particular with TLS authentication. If you're not familiar with it, SCHANNEL is an example of something called an SSP . It's a Windows implementation of standard authentication protocols...

I stumbled across a recent Slashdot posting about Second Life . There are some interesting comments amidst the dross, worth a read if you're interested in virtual worlds or Second Life in particular. The gist is, Second Life has made its client side...

Ever since I installed Vista Ultimate on my home machine, I've had grand visions of setting up Windows Media Center with my lifetime collection of media on a terabyte RAID5 array. Windows NT used to include a software RAID5, so if you weren't too concerned...

There are two broad areas in gaming I want to take a closer look at. The first is distributed games, and models for ensuring fairness and cheat-proofing. The second is issues which affect game play quality, such as latency and jitter in network connections...

We've been encouraged to install Vista at work for quite some time, but I measure how difficult it'll be for most people to use based on what happens at home. I bought my personal copy of Vista Ultimate about a week ago, and just got around to installing...

I saw a press release today for a new Hitachi 1 Terabyte drive , supposed to be available for $400. Oddly, this is something I've wanted for a long time, and was planning on buying an external RAID array to achieve. It's not that I need the space, or...