Microsoft Trip - 14/03/08

Geeking it up in Cambridge

On Friday, Lorcan and I flew out to Cambridge to go to Microsoft Research and visit some of the researchers who were part of the Whereabouts Clock. We met with Abigail Sellen (who looked after us for most of the day - thank you!), and we had a talk with her and also with Alex Taylor who also worked on the clock. We went through the differences with their clock and mine, the main issue being that mine is web-based and will more be for friends than family or colleagues. Abigail thought that this was completely different from their clock as theirs is designed to be at-a-glance but always there whereas if mine is on the internet then someone would have to log onto that page to see it and this perhaps defeats the purpose. This made me think and I would like to re-explore the possibility of having the clock as a tangible clock that can stand in a room rather than just be on the internet.

We then got to see the Whereabouts Clock and were shown a demo of it. There were a few icons and when an icon was pressed a new display popped up showing text messages that had been sent with the most recent being on top and you could scroll through these messages. One of the icons represented a child who would be too young to take part but when pushed the icon would make a sound and do random animations e.g., the icon would turn into a flower. Also when someone changed location the clock would make a noise which I liked the idea of and would like to use in my project. Below the clock is a small area where the settings are, I didn’t know what these were before so I was curious to find out, the pendulum swings in the middle and this would show the signal strength of the GPRS while on the left hand side was 5 buttons for brightness, Abigail mentioned that in the trials people liked to dim the clock at night and on the right there were 5 buttons for volume as sometimes the noises could be a little loud especially with children pressing their icon. We also got to see other past projects such as HomeNotes.

After lunch we met with Tim Regan, who did not work on the clock but he was full of ideas especially regarding how to acquire Wireless Access Points, and told us about past projects that he had worked on which were all incredible. He kindly took our picture next to the Whereabouts Clock and sent them on. We then got to talk to Sharam Izadi who was behind the technology part of the clock and I showed him what I’d done so far but of course it decided not to work properly!

After meeting everyone we got a chance to go into the town of Cambridge and it is such a lovely town so I’m glad I got to see it. It was such a good day and we didn’t run into any problems which was very surprising!

I had such a good day and a big thank you to Microsoft Research for having us and also to the college who funded this trip – I really appreciate it and came back eager to get started on my project again! But first there is the small matter of exams…