Hundreds of researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs in China, England, India and the United States gathered Tuesday for the TechFest 2007, annual event at the company’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. The event was intended for Microsoft’s researchers to come together and exchange ideas, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing.

Some of the projects on display this year, World-Wide Telescope allows people to turn their PC into one of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world. The technology draws on tens of millions of digital images of stars, galaxies and quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious astronomical project started several years ago to map out a large part of the universe. But until now, the images were difficult and time consuming to search. “What we’ve done is give people the ability to become digital astronauts,” Microsoft Research Senior Vice President, Rick Rashid said. “You can explore deep space from the comfort of your living room.”

Researchers also plan to add rich media narrative to the images to create compelling learning experiences. “These will be tantamount to guided tours of the universe,” Rashid said. “People will have an immersive way to search, explore and discover the universe much like MSN Virtual Earth.”. Other projects introduced by the Microsoft’s researchers on Tuesday were:

A Living Scrapbook

Rashid also showed Mix: Search-Based Authoring, a technology that pulls data from many sources — different Web sites, the computer’s hard drive and databases — and integrates the data into one document that can be easily shared with friends, family members or co-workers. “Think of Mix as a kind of high-tech, living scrapbook,” Rashid said. “You can create a page that has digital pictures of your family, e-mails you exchange with family members, and links to places you love to visit together. And you can send that page to any other member of your family –all without having to build a Web page.”

Xbox as Teaching Tool for Future Scientists

Boku, a virtual robot in a simulated world, debuted as a research project to teach kids basic programming skills in a fun and entertaining way. “There is an ongoing and deepening crisis in computer science,” Rashid said. “Our goal is to stem the tide by showing young kids the magic of software programming.”

Using Xbox, kids as young as four years of age can program a robot to interact with its world, travel around among various objects the kids create, and even eat an apple. “It’s very much like playing a game,” Rashid said. “But it’s a serious endeavor that we believe will begin to interest kids in programming and eventually make them more comfortable tackling the really big challenges in computer science.”