Geeking out at the Microsoft Visitor Centre

Welcome to Building 92 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, home of the Microsoft visitor centre and company store both open to the public.

So many serious posts lately, I thought it would be fun to take you on a quick tour of the Microsoft Visitor Centre that I got to visit in January.

As I enter, I’m greeted by a picture that looks like a cross between that 70s show and Big Bang theory. Do you think they had any idea what Microsoft would become?     

A Microsoft surface table brings back memories, this was the first multi-touch device I encountered, I first saw it at the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles a few years back. At the time pinch, zoom, and swipe seemed revolutionary. Now we do it every day as we slide from one photo to another or zoom in and out of a map. 

They didn’t have any of the Nokia phones on display, but they did have the new HTC and Samsung devices. You don’t need a big surface table to explore multi-touch now, you already have it in the palm of your hand.  

Now we’ve moved from multi-touch to no touch and voice recognition the possibilities really are amazing! And what really rocks is that it’s not just professors in research labs who get to play with this technology, we have it in our living rooms with Xbox and Kinect, in our coat pockets with smart phones! All we have to do is download the SDKs and start coding!

I can’t help it, playing with this amazing technology just brings out the kid and me and reminds me of how far we’ve come from punch cards, TRS-80 computers and Pong game systems. It’s an exciting time to be a developer!