HP opens up its research labs just a little more

While Hewlett-Packard has been re-launching its HP Labs, it's been keeping mum on its IdeaLab, a special department where HP researchers are working on technologies that may one day affect user experience in the future.

"These are research projects," an HP spokesperson told BetaNews today. "Some of them may never become products. Others can reach the public in a number of ways as HP products or in HP products or as technology we license to others. HP Labs works with a long time horizon than the product R&D groups."

HP designed the IdeaLab to be an outlet where regular consumers can catch a glimpse of emerging technologies. The Palo Alto-based company also hopes interested users will give the company feedback on some of its projects.

But to get that feedback, more people have to know IdeaLab exists, which means HP needs to speak up a little bit.

Here are just some of the projects HP is working on in the IdeaLab:

• mscapes, a service that is context-aware and allows users to select multimedia content based on location and time
• Interactive Relighting, which allows users to capture and view images of 3D objects that may be able to reveal hidden details in the images
• CloudPrint, a service that lets users share and store photos on a mobile phone but print them on HP CloudPrint-enabled printers
• BookPrep, a service which allows users to purchase and read books that are out of print
• Snapfish Lab, media processing tools that let users offer HP feedback on the imaging tools
• Color, an online color thesaurus that explains color names, synonyms and antonyms

HP's IdeaLab Web site offers descriptions, downloads. and demos of each product HP feels is advanced enough for public testing, along with images and videos of researchers and their current projects.

Major tech companies often have internal testing labs where they are able to use funds for research and development, while many the tested technologies never make it to public use. For example, Intel is working with universities and other members of academia on a project focused on wireless sensor networks and other radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.