Infosys | Microsoft

At the turn of the century (year 2000) desktops and laptops were still going strong and mobile phones had just started to appear. I had put my hands on my very first mobile phone in year 2001 as getting a landline took few weeks and the mobile phone was activated within a day or two. I had moved to a new place and hence getting connectivity was critical. The mobile phone allowed me to stay connected while on the go, and in those days, I had to pay to receive calls as well. I had not thought of how the phone would evolve into today's smart phone with significant processing power, with ability to capture and view high resolution photos and HDMI videos, with ability to let me be connected with friends over facebook and twitter all the time and with ability to download and install thousands of applications from its very own marketplace. My family is hooked onto Angry Birds :-).

Continue reading "Desktops / Laptops / Tablets / Smartphones" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have earlier seen that Microsoft Surface has been making its mark in domains like retail banking and automobile sales. Apart from these, we at Infosys have been exploring applications of Surface for retail establishments and in particular consumer electronics stores. By leveraging Microsoft Surface, retail stores can take their customer experience to the next level, along with the possibility of increased sales.

Continue reading "Microsoft Surface for retail stores" »

Posted by Vikas Dewangan at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We earlier saw that retail banks are deploying Microsoft Surface as part of their future banking experience. Here we will take a look at another domain where Microsoft Surface is an excellent fit - delivering a futuristic in-store automobile shopping experience.

Continue reading "Next generation automobile shopping experience using Microsoft Surface" »

Posted by Vikas Dewangan at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Surface is getting a big facelift with the commercial launch of the 2.0 version developed in collaboration with Samsung. Here is a quick listing of what's new. We at Infosys having worked with customers in the past on the earlier Surface platform are all excited about this. Especially the thinner design that supports vertically mounting and the lower cost of this new version expands the scope of potential business applications. One particular domain that is showing much promise is retail banking.

Microsoft Surface can help generate customer interest in financial products, increase sales and reduce processing cycle time. We are exploring Surface being used at retail banking branches both as a self-service kiosk as well as a discussion tool for customers with banking sales representatives. The bank can issue credit or debit cards featuring identity tags using which customers can identify themselves by placing these on the Surface table. Alternatively identification can be achieved by placing their cell-phones, which might need a preinstalled application that communicates with Surface via Bluetooth. Similarly banking sales representatives can have identity cards with these tags to identify themselves and manage information using Surface.

Continue reading "The future of retail banking with Microsoft Surface" »

Posted by Vikas Dewangan at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is hardly two years since Microsoft had showcased Windows Phone 7. The SDK came out in September 2010. In Asia the availability of Phone 7 has just completed an year and we have already had a version upgrade to Mango (7.5).

On desktop/tablet side, Windows 8 developer preview was first made widely available in Build Conference in September 2011. The beta is expected anytime soon and then later this year the final release of this product.

Continue reading "Phone 7, Mango, Windows 8, Windows 8 on ARM, Apollo (Phone 8)... phew! " »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft launched Kinect for Windows a few days ago and this seems to be a good time to touch upon its business prospects. Infosys has been experimenting with Kinect since a while and we are quite excited with the possibilities. Kinect has an interesting combination of sensors including depth sensor, RGB camera, multi-array microphone and accelerometer. This caught the attention of innovators who created several Kinect "hacks", which far exceed any applications Microsoft would have imagined, when they originally released Kinect as a gaming controller. The main advantage of Kinect for Windows (over the Xbox version) is the "near mode" that allows subjects to be sensed as close as 40 cm. as compared to around 80 cm. in the default mode (and the Xbox version of Kinect). This opens up the doors for applications where proximity is preferred. So, let's see some business applications:

Continue reading "Exploring the business prospects of Kinect " »

Posted by Vikas Dewangan at 5:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft annouced the other day availability of Kinect for Windows SDK. This version can be used to build commercial application, something which wasn't possible with the earlier SDK. Alongside a new hardware device is also available now (priced higher than the earlier one).

While this SDK will work earlier device as well you would not be able to leverage the new near mode support which allows you to detect objects mearly 40 cms from the device unless you use the new device as well. Additionally if you are migrating your earlier code to the new SDK, you may want to use the Microsoft.Kinect.Migration assembly to aid the migration effort.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 4:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In Immersive Technologies Track we are working on some exciting technologies related to data visualization, touch, gesture and augmented reality. The main products on our radar are Phone 7, Surface and Kinect. We recently published a technology roundtable newletter sharing some insights of our work. You can get to the newsletter from here.

Comments are welcome.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)