Microsoft Says Future’s Technology Works Today

When Microsoft shared another future vision video, everyone was excited. The second video continues over the one they produced two years ago. Translucent glass displays with intuitive interfaces shown in the video also raised eye brows and the Microsoft-haters were quick to dismiss the videos as nothing more than a scene from a 9 year old film–The Minority Report. Having seen some of the technology demo-ed in the first vision video, I find little credence in the skeptics’ arguments. In a video shared on the Office Casual blog, Doung Thomas has done a behind-the-sceneson the second future vision video. Doug shares glimpses of Microsoft’s Envisioning Lab and shows how current Microsoft products are milestones of what is shown in the vision video. Doug talks about three current products that are concepts shown in the future vision video:

• Excel Powerpivot that connects databases and Excel sheets to create visuals to understand data
• Microsoft Tags and Windows Phone tag-scanning (eye-wear being able to translate information from possible “tags”)
• SkyDrive (Office Web Apps), Office 365, SharePoint and Outlook Social Connector will evolve into “natural collaboration”

With Office Lync and Skype under Microsoft, natural collaboration as shown in the vision video working with PowerPivot isn’t a far-fetched glossy video from Microsoft. The vision video shows how researchers and engineers at Microsoft are working towards enabling better computing. Technologies behind products like Kinect, Bing (geo-spatial innovation) and TellMe will come together in products that make these future vision a reality. Here are the three videos:
Microsoft Future Vision 2009:

Microsoft Future Vision 2011:

Behind the scenes of Future Vision 2011:

Tags: information microsoft