I'm at a friend's house right now in Mountain View, getting ready for the second day of Maker Faire. The first day was a lot of fun. I got to walk around and take a look at some of the booths, but spent most of my time with the guys over at the Microsoft booth.

There was a pretty cool game they had there where you used a cell phone camera to pick up game pieces to build an Incredible Machine with. I was #1 for a short time, but my reign came to an end after I suggested a way that someone could beat my score, and they used the method to absolutely trounce me. One of the guys there showed me some of the other uses for the tech, including an awesome augmented reality app that displayed 3d objects oriented based on the marker. I'm going to talk to them a bit further to see if this is something that I can use in some of my events.

I also got the chance to spend some time demoing some of the tech they had at the booth, giving the other guys a bit of a break. I got to practice demoing tech that I'd never seen before, similar to when I was at the Imagine Cup event a couple weeks ago showing off Microsoft Sync. This time I showed off Clint's self balancing skateboard, garnering a lot of sympathy for the fact that it wasn't functioning because the gyroscope was stolen, along with a couple of laptops, in a smash and grab from Clint's car. I also showed off Deep Zoom, which I had played with before, and Photosynth, which I was seeing for the first time. I watched the demo for Photosynth twice, then figured I knew as much about it as I needed to, so I jumped right in and started demoing. During the brief breaks I had, I played with the different features a bit and found it to be a cool little system. I can't wait until they release it in whatever form it's going to be released in and let me play with it.