Channel9 Tours MSR with Kevin Shofield

Scoble and Co. take us on a tour of the Microsoft Research facilities. It starts out with the extremely bright Lili Cheng from the Social Computing Group, talking about the app that made waves at PDC'03: Wallop. She still won't let me get an account, but that's another story for another day.

Next up we meet the guy that invented laser printers ("that's quite an interesting story", and it was.) and we see how messy extremely bright people really are.

Along the way we run into one of the guys that worked on the new MSN Search stuff. He might as well have been wearing one of those "Quiet Period" t-shirts from Google, cause he couldn't discuss much.

Finally, we get to the really good stuff. 10,000 motors on a 1 inch chip. That's, like, a lot of motors ;). And microprojectors. I'm waiting for the day when they can print out a massive sheet of those suckers, and build it across entire walls of rooms. Think displays like the main viewer on the Enterprise. If it costs $2-$3 to display to project a 1x1 image, it would cost $26-$39K to cover my 8'x11' bedroom wall. Where would that be useful for? Well, if you ask Rory, his answer would be: "For porn, of course. The porn industry is responsible for every invention of the 20th Century." If you think I'm joking, ask him how we got to the moon in 1969. I, on the other hand, would use it for my Xbox. And downloading movies from Netflix. and Windows XP MCE.