A Different Point of View
Led by a team of researchers at MSR (including Jaron Lanier), Peekskill was a multimodal approach to wearable devices like a Fitbit, Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch, etc. The screen real estate on those devices is fixed, and only so much information can be seen at any given time. With Peekskill, the display had two modes: a) standard watch face with limited screen space, and b) a high resolution near eye display. When the wearable was brought up to the eye, the high-resolution screen would appear, the functional equivalent of a desktop display. This would allow for users to view far more information than possible with just an inch-and-a-half on a side.
In 2009 I returned to Microsoft after a short hiatus to pursue oil painting professionally. While I has been seeing some success, the financial catastrophe scared the bejesus out of me. I had been doing some consulting work for my old group (Aces Games Studio), and as things developed, my old GM offered me the opportunity to come join him in a new venture that was part of Microsoft Research, an innovation incubation group focused on using MSR tech and building product around it. The opportunity to work on
I ended up spending about four years in the Startup Business Accelerator, and I shipped two products (Avatar Kinect, and volumetric video as part of the Mixed Reality Capture Studio team, ultimately graduating to the Mixed Reality group under Alex Kipman).
As part of our core design group, I also got to contribute (in very minor ways) to things like the early Surface Hub, to Fresh Paint, and to a few projects that never made it much past ideation stages, like Project Peeksill