The Microsoft Vision for Tagging Reality

This demo was shown at the Emerging Technology Conference at MIT yesterday:

In what was perhaps a more compelling demo, [Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig] Mundie showed a video of a woman in Seattle looking at a live scene through the camera on an ultra mobile pc device. On screen, the client was pulling data from a web based service to tag items in the scene — the names of buildings, the number of public transportation buses, information about how far away taxis were via GPS, etc. That’s the sort of useful, real world application that makes Microsoft’s vision of the future exciting.

Microsoft sees a bit of client-side computation, whereas Google sees a “dumb client” per blogger Josh Catone.

- SitePoint blog