A couple of weeks ago I spent a day visiting Microsoft Research and gave a talk on our lab’s work on in-car speech user interfaces. My hosts were two Microsoft researchers, Tim Paek and Ivan Tashev. I was also accompanied by one of my graduate students, Oszkar Palinko.

As part of the visit Ivan gave us a tour of two Microsoft Research labs. First we visited the acoustic anechoic chamber. This was a really neat experience. Check out the video below in which Ivan introduces this lab.

While it’s impossible to show in a video how quiet it gets in the anechoic chamber, check out the following video which shows me clapping inside the chamber. You may be able to notice that there’s no echo (thus anechoic!). In the chamber you could also notice this just by listening to people and hearing the dramatic change in perceived speaking volume as they (or you) turned.

Ivan also showed us his newly installed driving simulator. The simulator is made by STI and Ivan plans to use it very soon in his ongoing work on Commute UX, a “telephone dialog system for location-based services.” Oszkar and I had a chance to test the simulator and some of the cool “traps” or scenarios in which a distracted driver may end up in an accident. Here’s a video of me testing the MSR driving simulator.

I uploaded some picture from this visit here.

Thanks Ivan for the tour and thanks to both Ivan and Tim for hosting.

Andrew Kun

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed