REDMOND, Wash -- It's that time of year again: A time when Microsoft researchers from all over the globe head back to the motherland (Redmond, Wash) to show off their projects for employees and a handful of press.
This year, expect applications and hacks revolving around mobility, search, graphics and security…as well as a few surprises. Things will officially kick off bright and early Tuesday morning with a tag-team keynote from Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. That will be followed by an entire afternoon of demoliciousness. We'll also get to see if Microsoft has updated its soda since the last time we visited the labs.
To get things started, we've been promised a preemptive demo of the World Wide Telescope (a.k.a. the Virtual Observatory) tonight, which was showcased at last year's TechFest. The WWT is basically a software app that grabs imagines from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world and lets you zip around the night sky (think inverted Google Earth). Indeed, for a company that spends on average about 14 percent of its sales on R&D, you better believe there's going to be some cool stuff on the demo floor tomorrow. Stay tuned!
