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By Nick Wingfield

Everybody knows Microsoft for basic software that helps people get everyday tasks done. But this week the company gets to show it can do more than just spreadsheets and word processors.

An event called TechFest that kicked off Tuesday at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a kind of company science fair where the propeller heads across Microsoft’s vast research and development groups get to strut their stuff. There’s a lot of company pride in the event, which is Microsoft’s way of showing it’s in the big leagues of corporate R&D with one-time innovators like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC.

microsoftFor all their inventiveness, those research labs also missed out on opportunities to commercially exploit some of their best projects. Xerox PARC, for instance, was a pioneer of the graphical user interface and computer mouse, but let Apple and Microsoft harvest most of the rewards of those technologies. In an interview with this blog, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, says Microsoft won’t make the same mistake.

Microsoft research, relative to its age, has been more effective at translating technology into product groups than those other labs were, Mundie says.

From a sheer coolness factor, one of the standouts at TechFest was a technology called SecondLight, which resembles a Microsoft product called Surface that embeds a touch-sensing computer screen into a table top. SecondLight goes further by projecting an image through its table-top screen onto another surface that a user can suspend in midair.

In a demonstration, a Microsoft researcher held a small rectangular piece of acrylic about a foot above SecondLight’s screen and a video image of a running man appeared on the plastic. The video image remained even as the research swept the piece of plastic over the surface of the table and tilted it so the plastic was perpendicular with the table. Microsoft says the technology could some day be used in meetings, where each participant could be examining different images brain scans or x-rays, for example.

Another technology Microsoft showed was a virtual receptionist that greets people with a friendly, animated female face on a computer screen. Microsoft designed a demonstration of the technology to do basic tasks like registering visitors to Microsoft’s buildings and calling shuttles that transport people around the company’s campus.

No word yet on how Microsoft’s existing human receptionists feel about the technology.