Microsoft Corp.'s Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.
"Aura is all about assuming a number of Web resources exist and then gluing these things together," Smith said, in an interview with eWEEK.com. "We're pulling pieces out of cyberspace and putting them together." Microsoft Research, which first created a prototype for Aura in 2000, more recently developed a reference architecture using the Toshiba e740 PocketPC with 802.11 wireless access and an attached Socket CF bar-code reader.
News source: eWeek
