What’s in Microsoft’s What’s Next booth at CES?

A ton of cool tech that’s what – I had time to shoot a video with our social media team today which you can see above. If you’re at CES, head on over to the What’s Next booth to get the chance to see everything first hand. What have a focus on natural user interface and design in the space – Steve Ballmer talked about both in his keynote last night.

On the NUI front, we have Surface 2.0 – sporting a set of wooden legs that have a definite Charles and Ray Eames look. This thing is going to look so good in my house next to my lounge chair. Also on the NUI side of the house, we have KinectFusion – project from Microsoft Research you may have seen in a recent post from The Verge. You can do as Josh Topolsky did – come and sit in the space and have virtual balls dropped on to a 3D model of you. Our final NUI demo is courtesy of a partner, FaceCake, who have their amazing Swivel virtual fitting room setup. Steve Ballmer also mentioned in his keynote last night that we’ve released Kinect for Windows and companies like FaceCake, Unilever, Citi, and Toyota are building applications based off it. The Kinect Effect in action.

On the design front, we have the amazing Printing Dress on display in the booth. This is an exploration in wearable computing from Microsoft Research that combined a dress made from paper (old skool news medium) with tweets (new news medium) projected on to the surface of the dress. It’s really just a conceptual exploration but has caught the imagination of many and won Best Concept and Best in Show at International Symposium on Wearable Computers in San Francisco last year. It’s just one of a number of wearable computing projects at Microsoft.

Finally, we have a hardware showcase with some of the great designs that have been coming from the Microsoft Hardware group. The award winning Arc Touch mouse, the 18m selling Kinect, the Xbox 360, the beautiful LifeCam Studio and the Microsoft Touch Mouse. Design is seeing a real renaissance at Microsoft – you can see if across our booth and I wanted to ensure people realized it’s not just software design, it’s hardware too.