Envisioning Center: giant touch screens everywhere. The future according to Microsoft

At Microsoft they continue to imagine every day what the technology of the coming years will be like and how it will influence our homes and workplaces. In Microsoft Research the Redmond company's engineers try to anticipate the near future, and at Xataka Windows we have spent weeks reviewing some of the projects they are working on. Some of these projects, or ideas associated with them, now serve as a reference for a new video that shows us the vision of the future that they want to transmit from a new center.

Under the name of Envisioning Center, Microsoft has brought to its Redmond campus a place to imagine how technology will facilitate our daily lives and our work in the medium and long term. The center's facilities are made up of scenarios that recreate a home or workplace filled with products and technologies directly inspired by the work carried out at Microsoft Research and other divisions of the company.

Giant touch screens, multiple projection surfaces, a large number of sensors and speech recognition will allow you to build highly interactive environments. Whether in our jobs, in our kitchen or in our living room, Microsoft proposes in the video that you have on these lines some ideas about what technology could provide us in a matter of a few years. Serve this post as a brief review of what is shown.

At work

The giant screens will leave behind the whiteboards in our offices. Occupying every wall, these new touch surfaces will allow information to be displayed and interacted with anywhere in the workplace. In the video, a huge screen several meters high serves as a stage to present an entire project, interacting with it and taking meetings to a new level.

The advances you imagine from Microsoft are also transferred to our work tables. We will work on digital boards capable of synchronizing on the fly or through contact with other devices such as tablets or smartphones. The multi-touch capabilities of our future work tables will make virtually unnecessary any peripheral or instrument beyond our own hands.

In the home

The fashion for large screens as walls is also moving inside our homes. Who would not like to have a touch screen in their kitchen the size of the one Microsoft shows us in the video? This will also be connected to the rest of the household elements, allowing you to control any screen or element in our homes directly from it.

And as we imagine applications for the kitchen, Microsoft engineers come up with the idea that the system's multiple sensors and cameras will be capable of detecting us and all kinds of objects, including ingredients or cooking utensils. The system will be permanently connected, offering us information instantly that can also be projected on any surface in the style of other technologies that we have already talked about, such as OmniTouch or LightSpace.

Reference ideas for the future

The new Redmond Envisioning Center and the video with which they have accompanied its opening are, for now, exercises in the imagination of Microsoft engineers. Although based on projects that other divisions of the company such as Microsoft Research are working on, in principle, none of the technologies shown are part of future products

It is about opening a window (pun intended) to a relatively near future of between 5 or 10 years, with which anticipate possible future technological trends and learn about the interaction of users with them. The video that accompanies these lines is an example of this. In the coming weeks we will continue to reveal some of these ideas and projects that they are working on at Microsoft.

Via | Next at Microsoft In Xataka Windows | The future according to Microsoft