Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  From 'What If?' To What Is: How Research Becomes a Feature (19 Sep 2004) Sometimes a research group will come up with a project that's offered to Microsoft customers. One example of this is Photo Story, offered through a Digital Media Plus! pack. Photo Story is a unique and fun way to show off the family pictures. When researcher Dave Vronay was working on PhotoStory, he wanted to recreate the feeling of a family sitting around an old-fashioned photo album and telling the stories connected to the pictures. "A picture is not just a description of what is there," he said. "For instance, if you have a picture of a hotel, and you showed it to a friend, you probably wouldn't just say, 'and that's the hotel we stayed at.' You might instead launch into a story about the waiter with purple hair who served you duck soup at the hotel restaurant, even though you didn't have a picture of him. The photo would be a reminder of the stories that surrounded that photo." Article URL: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=712 Read 133 more articles from Microsoft sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Glossary extraction and utilization in the information search and delivery system for IBM Technical Support     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy