Futuristic Demos from Microsoft’s 2009 College Tour

Rule No. 1 when trying to get college students excited about computer science is to roll out some cool demos. The raw video above, courtesy Microsoft, provides a glimpse of the prototypes to be shown this week by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer, during his tour of several college campuses this week — starting at Cornell University today and ending at the University of Washington on Thursday.

There’s no audio in the video, but via phone this morning, Mundie walked us through the demos and explained his motivations.

“I want to make kids understand that there’s a lot of exciting stuff happening,” he said. “For many people who aspire to some altruistic component of what they want in their future work, science and engineering and computer science majors are a great way for them to make a good living but also be increasingly influential in some of society’s toughest problems.”

Along those lines, this year’s demos focus on energy and the environment, incorporating two of Mundie’s favorite technology trends — data-intensive computer modeling and natural user interfaces.

The first demo in the raw video shows a computer model developed by Princeton University researchers using tools from Microsoft Research’s lab in Cambridge, England. The model shows how deforestation in the Amazon rainforest can affect CO2 concentrations — raising the average temperature in various places around the world, including the United States. That, in turn, could have a major impact on crop yield.

“That’s why these climate issues are significant,” Mundie said. “What I’m trying to explain to people is that, without this type of computational modeling, policy people really have little go on when making a decision about how the U.S. should behave relative to economic incentives or trade incentives or other things related to some of the actions in some of these other countries.”

As seen in the video, the next phase of the demos incorporates “multimodal” user interface that incorporates pen-based computing, voice commands and gestures. It also uses a curved rear-projection display and gesture-recognition technologies similar to those expected in Microsoft’s Project Natal motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360.

The technology being modeled in that second phase of the demo is an alternative nuclear reactor. The model draws from the work of TerraPower LLC, a project of Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based invention house headed up by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold. Bill Gates is among the investors in the project.

“They could really only undertake this because they can now economically assemble computational facilities suitable to modeling these types of new reactors,” Mundie explained. – TechFlash