Microsoft Live Labs is a catalyst for the convergence of two critical facets of technology development. The aim is to inspire new thinking and new approaches to product innovation.
By Julie Evans

Microsoft Live Labs is going to a place where few have gone before: the intersection of basic research and pure engineering. Its mission: to drive state-of-the-art Internet technologies.

Live Labs was founded by Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, who saw the need to form a trench in the middle between the long-term nature of researchers and the near-term focus of engineers.

“… there’s an intersecting point somewhere in the middle where there’s this convergence of research and engineering where a lot of interesting things happen,” Flake said. “The notion of being a little bit in the middle is one that’s a little bit awkward for Microsoft. We wanted Live Labs to be a place that was really having a home in the middle between these extremes. We apply this pattern not just on the continuum between engineering and research, but we also think about it in terms of tactics versus strategy, long-term versus short-term, horizontal platforms versus vertical engineering. In every case, we are aspiring to try to make the market connect the dots between the two extremes.”

The Live Labs team has about 70 members in engineering, research, development, testing, business management, and operations. Researchers spend 80 percent of their time working in a bottom-up, self-directed fashion and about 20 percent helping engineering with top-down projects. Conversely, engineers work on top-down, directed projects about 80 percent of the time, while having 20 percent of their time to work on whatever interests them. Live Labs is working currently on about 15 projects.

“It’s a place for PhDs who love to build stuff to work with engineers who love to rapidly innovate new technologies,” said Brett Brewer, technical assistant. He said Live Labs acts as a virtuous cycle: more innovative products enhance Microsoft’s reputation, which can be leveraged to recruit new talent who will develop innovative products, which will enhance Microsoft’s reputation further.

There is a misperception in the industry that Microsoft doesn’t create cutting-edge Internet products, Brewer said. “Many in the industry think of us as followers and not true innovators in this area. Our first order is to give concrete proof points that we as a company are innovators, not just fast followers.”

Often mistakenly called “Windows Live Labs,” Brewer said the group consciously left Windows out of its name “to make it clear that we aspire to influence multiple product areas, not just Windows Live.”

Other companies have efforts similar to Live Labs; in fact, Flake started the research lab at Yahoo. Many labs, however, are focused on pure research, whereas “Live Labs is really more down the middle, 50 percent engineering and 50 percent research,” Brewer said.

A shining example of what Live Labs strives to do can be found in Photosynth, a system for visualizing large collections of photographs of a location or object by flying around in 3-D while viewing a sketchy 3-D model and “morphing” (cross dissolving) from one photo to the next.

“It’s the perfect marriage of a really great engineering product, and then, under the covers, some really great computer-vision algorithms,” Brewer said. “The combination of the two is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Photosynth was the brainchild of Rick Szeliski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research; Noah Snavely, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington; and Steve Seitz, Snavely’s advisor. “I have personally been involved in working with images and 3-D photos for over two decades, and being able to combine the richness of travel photography with the interactivity of 3-D games has long been one of my dreams,” Szeliski said.

The Live Labs team took its basic research prototype, called Photo Tourism, and added SeaDragon technology for handling large amounts of multi-resolution imagery. The team also refined the user interface and built a complete, Web-based experience around the basic idea.

“The best thing is the incredible collection of creative and passionate researchers, designers, and developers at Live Labs; especially Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the architect of SeaDragon, and Patrice Simard, their chief scientist,” Szeliski said. “They both saw the potential of Photosynth from its earliest days and helped bring this vision to life.”

The biggest challenge in working with Live Labs was reaching consensus on the vision, “since it elicits such strong (positive) reactions from everyone who sees it and wants to contribute,” Szeliski said. “We have too many ideas on how to expand and deploy the system and for its impact on our customers and the world at large, and we keep getting more from people outside of Microsoft who have seen our demos. Prioritizing all of these great ideas and building a system that is easy to use yet fresh and exciting is a big challenge, but everyone on the team is committed to making this happen, so it’s been great fun.”

A major challenge for Live Labs is effectively transferring their technology to product teams, Flake said. “I think the most challenging thing we manage on a day-to-day basis is the idea that we can’t be successful unless our partners are successful,” Flake said. “Evangelizing this idea that collaboration and connection between the teams is healthy and great thing … is a challenge. I think it’s a challenge worth working through. We get a lot of return in terms of the partnerships we have. It’s something that’s not quite natural at this point, and we spend a lot of time actually managing to this.”

Live Labs isn’t focused on what the competition is doing, although it closely watches industry trends, Brewer said. “With Photosynth, we didn’t go out and look at Flickr and Smugmug and say, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we had one?’ Instead, we said, ‘Wait, we have Seadragon, the University of Washington had a cool prototype to stitch photos together. … Let’s create Photosynth and bring them together to create something truly unique.”