You know those feel-good technology commercials where schoolchildren from across the globe interact with each other through a virtual television screen/blackboard? Microsoft is working on making that a reality.

At Techfest, the Applied Sciences Group showed pieces of a Virtual Window, a display screen that would allow two people to see and interact with each other. Techfest is an annual fair Microsoft Research holds in Redmond to show employees projects from the scientific research group.

It was still conceptual -- the components were not integrated into a single unit -- but the parts showed new ways of combining 3-D display with the Kinect motion sensor.

"We want to create the ultimate display and the ultimate video," siad Steve Bathiche, director of Applied Sciences.

Here are the various parts Bathiche showed at Techfest on Tuesday.

Wedge optic. A Wedge optic is a flat lens that can both display video and act as a camera that captures video. An earlier version of this technology is part of Surface, a touchscreen computer about the size and thickness of a flat-panel television. Today's touchscreen technology in smartphones and tablets recognize finger taps and pinches and pulls. The Wedge optic can recognize what kind of object is touching it, whether it's a drinking glass or a hand, and what direction it's coming from.

3-D optic video. The 3-D optic is a display screen that tracks the viewer's eyes with a Kinect motion sensor to show glasses-free 3-D video. Bathiche called it "the first 3-D autosteroscopic steerable display." It also can reflect the viewer in the image, like a mirror. For instance, in the demo shown Tuesday, you could see a teapot in 3-D on screen, and the viewer's image was reflected in the teapot's surface.

Multi-viewer 3-D video. Another prototype display could broadcast two different 3-D broadcasts to two people sitting side by side in front of the same screen. The screen also tracked the viewers' eyes with a Kinect motion sensor. Theoretically, two people could be sitting in front of a screen and one person could watch a 3-D football game and the other one could watch "Boardwalk Empire" in 3-D.

Virtual Window. This was a large display screen that used a Kinect motion sensor to track the viewer's position, and adjusted the display to the viewer. If you crouch down, the perspective shifts upward and vice versa.

Peter Lee, managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond, said what's significant about the project is that the Applied Sciences Group created a new way to build the optics.

"If you take the Wedge concept, the manufacturing tolerances are in the nanometers. That means Wedge displays will forever be hyper-expensive," Lee said. "He [Bathiche] and his lab developed a new manufacturing process" that brings the cost down.