SEATTLE -- Indoor wireless networks to guide you to your next meeting or connect you to the nearest printer. 3D desktops. Software that answers a question literally, rather than with a thousand Web links. Even singing computers. These are just some of the miracles Microsoft Vice President of Research Richard Rashid demonstrated Tuesday at MobiCom.
"Of course, this is research, not a product road map, so when it doesn't appear next year you can't say it's late," he quipped.
Rashid, speaking to the 400 scientists, researchers, and academics at the MobiCom technical conference dedicated to the world of wireless devices and networks, said that Moore's law (that computer capacity doubles every 18 months) has taken a Y2K holiday.
"Capacity is doubling every six months. We are seeing Wide Area Network technology increasing by a factor of 64 in a couple of years, multimedia technology increasing by a factor of 100 in three years, and storage increasing by a factor of seven in two years."
Furthermore, Rashid believes that wireless networking is on the cusp of revolutionizing the computer industry. "The number of people connected to wireless networks will grow to over a billion by 2004," he said.
This growth will be fueled by the proliferation of invisible computing or mobile wireless devices that connect to a network to carry out tasks.
Rashid demonstrated several wireless research projects underway at Microsoft.
Project Radar is described as a type of indoor GPS system. By placing a number of wireless sensors in a building, a robot's or human's position can be pinpointed and the information used to guide them to their destination. The system could be useful to engineers trying to locate the vending machines or frustrated executives looking for their next meeting.
Then there is Project Tempo, a research project using a similar technology to locate and connect to the nearest printer or overhead projector in a given building.
For those who want to manage household devices from a remote location there is Project Aladdin, a technology that uses a standard email package such as Microsoft Outlook to control devices like a garage door or a video tape recorder.
However, conference attendees had mixed reactions to Rashid's presentation.
"I suppose that listening to Microsoft for an hour and a half is the price we have to pay for their sponsorship of the conference," said Dan Chalmer, an academic from the computer department of Imperial College in London. "I don't think that Microsoft was really showing any original research but just applications using some of the new technologies available on the market today."
For others, some of the most interesting aspects of Rashid's presentation had little or nothing to do with pure wireless technology. For instance, Rashid demonstrated new speech synthesis technology that sounded very like a human voice -- and even sang a few rifts from the Simon and Garfunkel classic Scarborough Fair.
"Well it's not going to put Simon and Garfunkel out of business," said Rashid. "But it's a great improvement on the very first singing computer, called Daisy, which AT&T built in 1962."
Rashid also talked about MindNet, a data mining application that can dynamically find structure in the English language. The original research for MindNet was used in the Word 97 grammar-checking function.
"The ultimate goal is to be able to answer a natural language query with a natural language answer instead of serving up thousands of URL," he said.
Still, it was difficult to sort out the science from the science fiction, said Srinivasan Seshan, an IBM research scientist. "It will be interesting to see if any of these research projects ever make it to production."
