GeoGoodies from Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC)
Rick Rashid of Microsoft Research hosted the final keynote of the event on Wednesday. Among the geographically related goodies he showed:
- “a project called SensorMap that uses environmental sensors in connection with mapping technology. In the demonstration, Zhao showed off heat sensors that were set up around the Los Angeles Convention Center, where PDC is taking place. He showed the placement of air conditioning vents and how well cooling spread throughout the building.”
All good - but how do we find and integrate sensors that we might want to share data from? That’s part of OGC interoperable vision for SensorWeb. Not surprisingly, results of use of SensorMap appear on Virtual Earth in one example.
- “SecondLight, an upgrade to Microsoft’s Surface touchscreen tabletop PC design. SecondLight embeds a second, hidden image into Surface’s main display, which can only be seen when projected translucent screens held above the device’s surface.”
As I understand it, you can have two “layers” of data that don’t interfere (or interact?) with one another. I’m still teasing out how having one physically above the other helps in interpretation. My only thought is that you can manipulate the surface directly without getting in the way of the other layer. On first look this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. There’s more on how it works from a presentation/paper given at User Interface Software and Technology conference.
