• Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Please! Are we talking about Microsoft Bob or what?

      While I was there they were working on integrating presence detection. I saw some demos where lights would go on when you walked into a room. Music you were listening to would also follow you into the new room, unless somebody there was already listening to something else. If you were using a computer your desktop environment would also migrate to a computer in the new room. Never saw that hit the market in any way I was aware of.

      Lots of stuff MS Research did never saw the light of day. One time when my kids were playing Toontown I found a bug that let a player slip behind the graphics. You could see that the clerk at the store was just a legless torso floating in the air, and you could even go behind the walls and fly backwards into empty space until the whole world shrank to a dot. This same bug was present in a MS project called V-Worlds I had worked on a couple years earlier, so I always wondered if they had made a deal with Disney to use the code or if it was just a common graphics bug.