Tuesday focus: Gadgets

When Microsoft Corp. researchers think about the consumer technologies of the future, some of the physical touchstones of today take on digital form. Even as the software maker tightens its belt to survive the economic downturn, it has pledged to continue spending money on research that doesn’t neatly translate into profits. Here are some prototypes researchers revealed last week at Microsoft’s TechFest:

•Family Archive is the digital equivalent of stuffing memorabilia and photographs haphazardly into a box and tossing it in the basement. The program lets people create virtual boxes to stash photos and, eventually, videos. It can also take a photo of an object placed on the surface and stash that, too. Kirk said prototypes have been placed in three families’ living rooms, with surprising results, including the digital capture of at least one live kitten.

•One program helps archive digital ephemera, from photos to Twitter messages, along a timeline; another “hand-delivers” saved messages and reminders when people with linked Bluetooth phones stand in close proximity.

•“Augmented reality,” or adding a layer of digital information to the physical world, can work like this: Point a cell phone camera at a restaurant facade, for example, and up pops the menu. The underlying program matched the shapes and shades in what the camera “saw” to a stored image and its labels.

•One of the researchers who brought Surface and its spherical cousin to TechFest was back, this time standing inside a handmade cardboard dome. Instead of swiping his hands across a screen, he waved them above a camera-and-projector combination. Each gesture zoomed or twirled Wilson and the reporters standing inside the dome through different types of three-dimensional data – a planetarium-style display of the universe, for example.

•Another set of projects moved the touch-sensitive area to the back of hand-held devices, making it easier to navigate without blocking the content on small screens with big fingers.

•Redmond researchers also continue to come up with ideas for tasks that should be doable from the car. Michael Seltzer climbed into a mock-up of a driver’s seat. An “earcon” – the audio equivalent of an icon – prompted him to listen to a computerized voice reading his text message, and he spoke back to the machine to send a quick text reply.

Associated Press