Microsoft Research’s website has lots of fascinating documents and a few programs and “sandbox prototypes” for download. Please remember that these products are still in development and may have bugs – so please read the software’s documentation and use with caution. 

Agent components provide animated characters (Genie, Merlin, Peedy, & Robby) to appear during specific help or instruction.

ConferenceXP enables you to see and hear others in a virtual collaborative space, called a venue. With ConferenceXP you can collaborate on an electronic whiteboard or on a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, send messages to each other, and more.

NEW! Easy Camera Calibration Tool can be used to determine a camera’s internal parameters (focal length, aspect ratio, radial distortion, etc.). The technique only requires the camera to observe a planar pattern shown at a few (at least two) different orientations. Either the camera or the planar pattern can be freely moved. The motion need not be known. (Support: Website)

GroupBar is desktop tool offering enhanced window management capabilities in a taskbar-like setting. The basic concept is that through simple drag-and-drop operations on window tiles within the bar, users can create lightweight, transient grouping relationships that allow them to perform certain higher-level window layout functions on multiple windows at once. (Sheesh ya, think an engineer wrote that?)

NEW! GroupShot creates a composite image from a series of photos. The photos must be of the same scene, taken from the same point of view within a short period of time. The application uses regions that you indicate to build a composite image automatically. (GroupShot website & Help)

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.

JetStream Image editor with cut and paste tool, based on sequential curve growing with interaction. (JetStream website)

 

NEW! MapCruncher lets users quickly convert existing maps into an online format that’s as fast and easy to use as Virtual Earth. PDF and raster maps can be converted in minutes just by clicking on corresponding landmarks on the user's map and the global maps in Virtual Earth. MapCruncher re-projects the user's map, rendering correctly registered and zoomed tiles that can be mashed up seamlessly with Virtual Earth’s standard road, aerial, and oblique imagery. (MapCruncher website)

 

MSN Screensaver can be personalized with background photos, news and weather information from MSN or RSS feeds.

Mping is a simple command line application that sends and receives multicast packets.

The Multicast Add-in for PowerPoint allows a presenter to multicast PowerPoint slides, including animations and effects, to a group of viewers.

NetScan data mines Usenet newsgroups to provide tools to discover new newsgroups, select high quality content from them, evaluate the likely reliability of the information, and, possibly, motivate participants to make valuable contributions by providing a service that can be thought of as a reputation system for communities.

Outlook Mobile Manager (OMM) brings the power of Microsoft Outlook to your portable device. OMM can prioritize your messages and makes smart decisions about when to send email. OMM also sends calendar reminders, task reminders, and an Outlook Today style daily summary all to your wireless device. 

UPDATED! Paint.net  originated as a Computer Science senior design project at Washington State University, and is still developed by the two alumni Rick Brewster and Tom Jackson who now work for Microsoft. (NEW! Plug-Ins!)

NEW! PHLAT (Prototype for Helpful Lookup and Tagging) is a new interface for Windows Desktop Search, enabling search through a user's own e-mail, files, and viewed Web pages. PHLAT makes it easy for users to specify queries and filters, attempting to integrate search and browsing in one intuitive interface. In addition, PHLAT supports a unified tagging scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems, such as files and e-mail. (Support: Blog Article)

Portrait is a prototype for mobile video communication. It supports .NET Messenger Service, Session Initiation Protocol and Internet Locator Service on PCs, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs and Smartphone.

 

NEW! Scalable Fabric is a task management system for the Windows desktop. A central focus area, defined by you, contains windows that behave in the traditional way. When you drag a window into the periphery, it becomes smaller and continues to get smaller the closer you get to the edge of the screen. This makes it possible to keep windows open all the time, and change "minimize" to mean "return to the periphery". Groups of windows can easily be created to represent different user tasks. Switching between groups is done simply by clicking on the task marker flag.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a website project to show the beauty of the universe by making a map of a large part of the universe for professionals and students.

NEW! SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder filters and sorts Outlook e-mail based on the type of message and the user’s history with an e-mail correspondent. The result: a collection of alternative views of your e-mail that can help you make sense of the deluge. (Support Documents: Help Guide & Overview)

SRC Toolbar is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, which is developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. It on-the-fly clusters a certain search engine's search results into different groups, and provide meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate user's browsing.

Start.Com "Gadgets" developers continue to showcase new technologies that will no doubt be in your future Start Page.

The TerraServer-USA provides access to a vast data store of maps and aerial photographs.

Treemapper Excel Add-In allows a user to quickly and easily generate a treemap visualization of any hierarchical data in Excel, or from a CSV or XML file. Treemapper is based on the Data Visualization Components also available from this group.

 

NEW! URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol warns about Typo Squatters. These “duplicate” website are setup to fool you into thinking you’re at the legitimate website. These bogus websites are hoping to trick you into entering your credit card number, password and, if possible, infect you with spyware at the same time! (Support Research Sites for Typo-Patrol & URL Tracer)

Video Cube allows one to load an AVI movie file as a volume, and play back the movie sampling space and time in different ways. It also provides a single cutting plane for interactively viewing single spacetime slices of the video. (Support Document: Video Cubisum)

Virtual Earth gives an immersive way to search, discover and explore the world online by combining aerial imagery, detailed maps and precise local search capabilities.

VirtualWiFi is an architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards, that abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card.

 

WinMine Toolkit contains a set of tools that allow you to build statistical models from data. (WinMine Toolkit web site)

 

World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX) is a centralized index of digital photos, where photos are tagged by the geographic location where they were shot.  It's an experimental research project explores possibilities with digital photographs and geographic location.