Those are just two of some 150 projects Microsoft Research is demonstrating here this week (March 7-8) as part of its annual TechFest gathering. The internal conference, expected to draw as many as 7,000 Microsoft employees, is aimed at sparking collaboration with product groups.

In an open session Tuesday (March 6), Microsoft showed a few dozen of the projects. While many focused on emerging software areas such as search and social networking, a handful focused on hardware such applications such as flat-panel displays.

Mike Sinclair, one of just three hardware researchers in the Redmond-based lab, showed a 100-micron MEMS device that used two banks of tiny mirrors to focus light for a flat-panel display. A display based on the device could have a 75 percent light efficiency compared to less than 10 percent for mainstream LCDs that use multiple filters. The device, based on concepts from a telescope, has switching times as fast as one millisecond, compared to as much as 10 ms for LCDs.

Gary Starkweather, a veteran Microsoft researcher and inventor of the laser printer, collaborated on the project along with Sinclair and a student intern. Sinclair cautioned that it would take significant work to bring the device into volume production.

"This is extremely embryonic," Sinclair said.

Sinclair also showed a demo of a keyboard that could recognize a wave of a hand thanks to a new capacitive-to-digital converter from Analog Devices Inc. Using the AS7745, a standard keyboard could notice a wave of a hand to scroll down a Web page or notice a user is absent and schedule a background maintenance task on the machine.

A Microsoft team in Germany discussed an applications programming interface aimed to link any sensor to Web services running on a PC. The Sensor Abstraction Framework could work over any transport protocol including Bluetooth or Zigbee.

One researcher showed a social networking application for the API. Users could enter data about favorite hikes and jogging paths in their city, including data from sensors measuring their speed, elevation and heart rate on the courses. The data was plotted on maps that let users look up activities, matching their interest and desired exertion levels. The API was developed in cooperation with a handful of unnamed sensor vendors. "A lot of sensor APIs have been discussed, but this is the first one that links to computers and Web services," said Harmke de Groot, a lead program manager at Microsoft Research.

Marc Smith, a sociologist at Microsoft Research, spoke on the importance of such social networking projects, showing tools to visually plot as well as zoom in and out of Web-based discussions on hot topics.

"The audience's power of content creation is now a force to be reckoned with," said Smith. "Software is becoming a relational media, and we want to gobble up the traces of these relations," he added.