Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Stephen B Coy

Lili Cheng

Matthew Bret MacLaurin

Todd D Newman

Steve Ickman

Mark Finch

Sameer Halai

Flynn Joffray

William L Portnoy

Georg F Petschnigg

Jonathan Edgar Fay

Michael C Miller

Matthew William Kernek

Eric Steven Anderson

Damien N Berger

Will Portnoy

Ashesh P Bakshi

A media party network service manages a set of media parties and a set of users of the media party service. Managing the media parties can involve instantiating new media parties according to input from the users, allowing the users to join the media parties, and tracking which users are participating in which media parties. Managing a given one of the media parties may include maintaining a queue of media items, allowing users in the media party to provide input to add media items to the queue and to provide input to skip media items in the queue. The media party service streams the given one of the media parties to client devices of the users currently in the given media party such that all of the client devices are currently displaying substantially a same part of a media item in the corresponding queue.

Collaborative media sharing

Methods, devices, and computer-readable media that allow real-time rendering while navigating virtually about or through a digital 3-D volumetric model. Examples provide techniques to facilitate real-time rendering while navigating through and around the 3-D volumetric model that can have many thousands of particles, where the particles can have emissive, occlusive, and translucent properties. Such complex particles of the 3-D volumetric model are presorted along predefined viewing directions in order to enable real-time rendering from when a navigation control has been entered. Presorting of data may be performed at a processing device(s) located across a public or private network from a user's device on which the real-time rendering is performed.

Real-time rendering of volumetric models with occlusive and emissive particles

Described is a virtual environment built by drawing stacks of three-dimensional objects (e.g., discrete blocks) as manipulated by a user. A user manipulates one or more objects, resulting in stack heights being changed, e.g., by adding, removing or moving objects to/from stacks. The stack heights are maintained as sample points, e.g., each point indexed by its associated horizontal location. A graphics processor expands height-related information into visible objects or stacks of objects by computing the vertices for each stack to draw that stack's top surface, front surface and/or side surface based upon the height-related information for that stack. Height information for neighboring stacks may be associated with the sample point, whereby a stack is only drawn to where it is occluded by a neighboring stack, that is, by computing the lower vertices for a surface according to the height of a neighboring stack where appropriate.

Discrete objects for building virtual environments

A rule-based programming language may be devised for programming an entity in an environment. Computer systems may therefore be configured to program the entity with at least one rule comprising at least zero language conditions representing an action condition, at least one language verb representing an action, and at least zero language verb parameters representing an action object. The computer system may also be configured to facilitate entry by a user of a rule set according to the rule-based programming language by receiving user selections of language conditions, language verbs, and language verb parameters. By facilitating the programming by users of entities within environments, the computer system may facilitate individuals (such as non-technical individuals, aspiring programmers, and children) in understanding programming concepts, encourage the development of experience with computer programming, and permit the generation of useful computer programs by non-proficient programmers.

Rule-based programming languages for entities in environments

A system combines 2D and 3D modeling in rendering shapes and includes: a 3D modeling factory to generate a 3D model of selected shape parameters or features; a front face factory to generate 2D text and text effects, and some 2D shape effects; a ground plane factory to generate effects that are rendered on a ground plane of a shape; and a rasterizer/compositing engine to combine 2D and 3D effects generated by the front face factory, ground plan factory, and the 3D modeling factory.

2D/3D combined rendering

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Stephen B Coy