TechFest attracts many creatures

Microsoft is sharing some of its far-out visions for the future of technology this week during TechFest, an annual science fair held by the company's advanced-research group. A sample was shown to the media and customers Tuesday, before the show opens to Microsoft employees today and Thursday.

One of the demonstrations was actually warm and fuzzy. Researcher John Douceur, left, holding Cleo the cat, showed a system for verifying that a person and not a data-scouring computer is visiting a Web site.

Many sites ask visitors to read a series of wavy letters, but that's getting easier for hackers to break. As an alternative, Douceur and colleagues developed Asirra, a system that displays animal images and asks visitors to identify which are dogs and which are cats.

Asirra uses images from Petfinder.com, a database of animals available for adoption, and gives visitors the option of adopting one of the animals.

TechFest also highlighted several funky systems for handling messages and images, developed by a Microsoft research team from Cambridge, England.

One is TimeMill, bottom left, a fairy-tale-like mirror with a built-in camera, based on a Tablet PC. When you spin the wheel, it takes your picture. Spin backward and it displays images of people who've used the device in the past.

Another Cambridge project is Text2Paper, bottom right, a family calendar system that receives and prints text messages such as appointments and shopping lists that are sent from phones. They are printed on clear stickers that can be placed on an adjacent calendar.

Each has a bar code, so others can take a photo of the stickers and have the information synchronized with their devices.

Seattle Times technology columnist Brier Dudley