REDMOND: If you look at a high-tech crystal ball, what can you expect? Probably this: technologies which can help you win a million dollars in a bet on your favourite team in a English premier league or an ICC World Cup; technologies which can make you reach the airport faster avoiding all potholed or jammed roads. And smart technologies which can save the earth from global warming.

Technologies of the future from around the world were showcased in Redmond, US, early this month at TechFest–Microsoft’s annual event where techies from Bangalore and Beijing to Cambridge and Connecticut converged to demonstrate technologies which may change our lives in future.

One such technology is TrafficSense-which can give you instant information about the level of clogging on a particular road or route at any given time in your city. The technology works through smartphones (your normal PDA phones, or GPRS phones) that sense location, acceleration and bumps via sensors, GPS, accelerometer and or microphones.

“The phone scans for and exchanges information from other participating phones in its neighbourhood, and reports processed information back to a central server for aggregation and reporting. We are conducting a trial on Bangalore roads as of now,” says Microsoft Research Labs research manager of mobility networks Dr Venkat Padmanabhan.

Another interesting application is for sports and betting websites for which Microsoft is reportedly in talks with ESPN and FOX Networks for implementation. The technology works on probability algorithms and presents the maximum chance of winning of a player depending upon his loss or win at each stage in a tournament. “It can also be implemented to see if Hillary Clinton stands to win against Barak Obama or vice versa but will require very complex algorithms,” said a researcher.

Another application BLEWS – crawls the Blogosphere and categorizes news stories according to the emotional charge they contain. For instance, if a news story about Bush’s war on Iraq contains emotionally charged words – it’s link will be marked with a blue or orange color. Similarly, liberal and conservative political blog posts and news stories are also segregated and ranked by the crawler.

And if you think that you cannot type as fast on the mobile or PDA keypad as on your PC’s, things may change now. LucidTouch – a mobile-device interface that helps you use all your 10 fingers for typing by touching the back of the LCD keypad of a PDA phone/mobile phone. “LucidTouch works on pseudo-transparency: By overlaying an image of the user’s hands onto the screen, we create an illusion of the mobile device itself being semi-transparent,” said a researcher associated with the project.

And if you face a problem reading a website in Chinese or Japanese, don’t fret. Xiaohua Liu, a researcher with National Language Computing in Beijing tells ET: “A chat or any character typed in any other language can simply be converted to English by using BiLingual Built in software which MS is developing and may integrate into its products.”

But the start attraction of TechFest this year was WorldWide Telescope, which made its debut during the event on March 3-4. The telescope uses imagery from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes like Hubble and Sloan Digital Sky Server.