The future (and several alternatives) on display at Microsoft's TechFest

If you like fresh new algorithms, dream of hanging sticky notes in mid-air, or have always wished your e-mail looked a little more like a beach ball, Microsoft Research's annual TechFest event will restore your faith in technology -- or, at least, the benefit of giving smart people room to run with ideas that aren't immediately profit-center-ready.

The yearly gathering of researchers from Microsoft's six research labs (Beijing, Bangalore, Mountain View, both Cambridges, and Redmond) is mainly a chance for the far-flung members of the group to present their ideas to colleagues at the mothership, but for a few hours, journalists are allowed to venture in.

Instead of polished products that have millions of dollars backing their push to market, TechFest's offerings tend to be put together by very small teams, often working literally until the night before the event to bring their product up to snuff -- a little like, say, your middle-school science fair of yore.

But in a good way. Some items are further along in the "prototype" process than others. For instance, the nifty new multi-site search traveling under "Code Name Viveri" should be online sometime this summer, but some of the work on enhanced cryptographic systems could take months or years to wend their way into shipping wares.

Some research teams come in with impressive track records for the adoption of their ideas into actual products. The Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools team, for instance, showed their CHESS testing tool last year, and now it's digging out Heisenbugs (deep and/or hard-to-reproduce glitches) in code inside and outside the company. That makes their nascent Cuzz stress-test concurrency fuzzer of especial note. And members of the team that previously worked on Surface and Sphere combined several technologies into a omnidirectional projector that can read users' gestures put viewers inside a hemispheric dome surrounded by, in turn, a 3D representation of a social network, images from the World Wide Telescope unveiled at last year's TechFest, and...a snowglobe.

As happens every year, a few de facto themes emerged among the approximately four dozen projects exhibited. 3D interfaces made a strong showing, both those based on Surface and those thinking along other lines -- those sticky notes, for instance, which you create and superimpose on realspace via your mobile phone. Social networking got a lot of attention, with two iterations of location-based social networking, tech that can draw individual files on your desktop into the social realm, a constellation of devices from the Cambridge (UK) offices, and -- to your writer's delight -- an e-mail interface that operates much like a social network.

(We'll go further into many of these projects in the days ahead, but a word about the e-mail which, yes, includes one view that strongly resembles a beach ball. The interface maps your inbox according to its best guess at social networks -- for instance, work, family, and so forth -- and sorts your inbox accordingly, grouping less-urgent threads lower. The groups self-manage over time, and messages and threads can be displayed in a number of highly readable new formats. Frankly, it's the freshest take on e-mail your writer's seen in two decades, and researcher Andrzej Turski is asked to forgive me for bleating "BUT I WANT IT NOOWWWW!" throughout his extensive demo.)

Very few of the things seen at TechFest will emerge in the marketplace in their current form. Research ideas are scavenged by product groups, and the quirky of two or three researchers can change when it passes through the hands of hundreds of other Microsofties. Among current offerings that incorporate ideas from years past are the Azure Services Platform's fault-tolerance replicated state library; Microsoft Live Search's Chinese auto-speller, cashback strategy, and face detector; Xbox 360's Kodu language; the 3-D image tool Photosynth; and .NET's mapping engine.

So now what? The research teams are presenting to their colleagues today (Wednesday) and tomorrow. After that, the technology transfer team, which acts as a bridge between researchers and product-development types, will step in to facilitate as needed.

And your reporter will be waiting right here for her beach ball.