Microsoft Technical Centre in Amsterdam
Yesterday I finally got to visit the Microsoft Technical Centre in Amsterdam - the nerve centre of Microsoft’s EMEA operations. I was actually quite shocked with what I saw.
My visit confounded my expectations. Honestly, I’d more expected ‘The Hive Lite’ and instead I found a vibrant and ever-evolving experience centre where visitors can do anything from use a wide range of mature and developed solutions to experiment and develop their own designs in some remarkably flexible spaces.
Hosted by Sjoerd Tolsma, their chief architect, the room I assumed would be a replica of a Signature Meeting Room (SRM) turned out to be the biggest surprise of them all. This is not just a space where you can experience the whole Front Row and SRM thing, you can try different configurations too. Centrepiece of the room is a table that Sjoerd co-designed himself, which both pivots, but remains fixed in the correct room position. I’m still pondering its possibilities… I just love such attention to detail!
I was there with my partner, Karsten Thoning Solaas, now leading the displays and solutions side of Visual Displays work in this sector, leaving me more capacity for my development and consulting gigs. We had been kindly brought by Yoshi Koike of Epson, with whom we have co-developed projector and ALR (ambient light rejecting) screen bundles for MTRs. We were also there to discuss these with Sjoerd.
The ‘project’ we are working on with Epson for MTRs can be expressed in a number of ways, but in essence it’s about taking these leading edge designs and delivering them into real-life normally lit workspaces - yes, even the ones with windows and strong daylight! To achieve AVIXA standard’s image quality minimum thresholds in such spaces, this can only be done with ALR laser projection. It’s not just about quality, it’s about displays that can be viewed all day long without creating asthenopia (‘eye strain’).
Posted: 6th September 2023