It's PCs All the Way Down!

One week out of every 10 or so, the scientists and engineers at Microsoft Live Labs are encouraged to take a hiatus from their normal work to pursue their own pet projects. It’s called “Out of the Box Week.” This spring, Dan Cory, a senior program manager, wanted to see if he could combine the functionality of software that makes photo mosaics out of collections with a tool that allows you to zoom and pan within a hi-res image. The result, which Cory, ’93, dubbed “Deep Bill,” is a portrait of company founder Bill Gates composed of thousands of pictures of Microsoft employees. Zoom in on any photo and each one is made up of images of still more employees. Then, for his final trick, Cory made the image of Gates transform into that of CEO Steve Ballmer, Gr. ’80. “It’s one of our most popular internal demos,” Cory says. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the rights to post it publicly.”