Sarin, a Microsoft researcher, created a wooden box with what looks like an old maritime compass on it. No matter where he goes in Seattle, the box's needle points to the nearest Starbucks.

The box contains a GPS antenna, a magnetometer and a computerized list of Starbucks locations in Seattle. The setup was slightly ridiculous — even Sarin admitted that no one's going to walk around holding something like that — but the point was to show that you don't need a fancy gadget for everything, especially when your brain is demanding a caffeine fix.

Simplicity — an interesting concept for Microsoft to ponder. And pondering is one of the goals of TechFest, an annual science fair held at the company to introduce research under way in its labs.

About 6,000 Microsoft employees were expected to attend TechFest, which runs through today in Redmond. Members of the media were allowed in Wednesday, but only permitted to see a small percentage of the 155 exhibits.

Many of the exhibits will never make it into an actual product. But some work has, such as a player skill-matching system now part of the Xbox Live online-gaming service. TechFest is designed to ensure that the company's product groups get a feel for research they might one day use.

"I always meet someone at TechFest who I didn't know I should know," said A.J. Brush, a researcher at Microsoft's Redmond lab. "We make a lot of connections that might take a lot of time if we didn't have TechFest."

Brush was showing attendees a digital calendar displayed on a Tablet PC, a notebook-shaped computer with a screen that users write on with a stylus. A user could fill out a virtual sticky note with event information and drag the note to a specific calendar date.

Many digital calendaring programs already exist, but families often still rely on the old-fashioned paper version to track dentist appointments and soccer practices. Brush said the idea is to make an interactive calendar that could replace the paper version. Microsoft even recruited women with children to test the program.

TechFest also reflected researchers' experiments with GPS, the Global Positioning System that uses satellite technology to determine the location of specialized receivers. Such receivers are embedded in numerous devices, from cellphones to watches.

Two projects involved buying 55 GPS receivers, loaning them to employees and keeping track of where they drove over a two-week period. With data from 8,400 trips to work with, the researchers set about trying to predict how drivers would behave while on the road.

Researcher John Krumm said he is developing a program that could predict where drivers are headed based on their driving patterns. The program could warn a driver of a traffic jam on Interstate 5, for example, or advertise how many Denny's restaurants the car would pass during the trip.

So far, it gets the destination right about half the time, Krumm said.

Researcher Muru Subramani used the same data to try to predict when a person would bring a car to a stop — either at a red light or to park. A software program could answer a driver's cellphone, place the caller on hold and alert the driver to the call once the car stopped, he said. No one else is working with this kind of data, Subramani said.

About 1 billion people in the world are illiterate, and a large percentage live in India and China, said Kentaro Toyama, assistant managing director of Microsoft's lab in Bangalore, India. Working with a nonprofit group in that city, Microsoft researchers developed a program that gives people who can't read a way to find job openings in the service sector.

Using a computer touchscreen, people could click on pictures to determine a position's requirements, salary and hours. The program is being tested among women in Bangalore.

Indian researchers are also working with government officials there to create a virtual map of the country — something that doesn't yet exist and would have been helpful after the region was hit with a tsunami in 2004.

Researchers reworked Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping program to suit India's needs, and plan to make it available in four languages, said P. Anandan, managing director of the lab.

Kim Peterson: 206-464-2360 or kpeterson@seattletimes.com

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