It's been in development for nearly half a decade, but this year at Microsoft's R&D extravaganza TechFest, the company finally lifted the curtain on its research-oriented Singularity OS. Let's just be clear from the get-go, though: while it's available for immediate use, Singularity is nowhere near anything you'd replace your desktop OS with. The sole intention here is to test out futuristic new concepts in application interaction, microkernel architecture, and so on, so don't expect to hear that Microsoft is hanging up the Vista apron or anything. But for the turbo-geeks in the crowd, the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 1.1 is now available for download for academic non-commercial use. And for the rest of us, well, we'll just see what the year 2011 holds in store.

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Read - Brush up on your Singularity theory
Read - Download that biz

Considering that Vista isn't exactly getting perfectly positive praise, it looks like Microsoft is looking into other ways to bring cashflow to Redmond. While we already know the firm is diving head first into the VoIP handset market, it looks like it'll also be involved with a new virtual headphone. In an effort to allow VoIP / computer-based communications to be handled without tethering yourself to your PC and also allow you to hear ambient conversations around the office, researchers at Microsoft have "developed an algorithm that adjusts the timing of sound waves emitted from each speaker in an array, creating a focused beam of sound that acts as virtual headphones." Essentially, the speakers would create a "sweet spot" so that computer users could hear the audio perfectly, while individuals just inches away from the sound zone wouldn't hear much more than a peep. Furthermore, the focused wave technology could even bleed over into the tracking realm, which could actually allow the tones to follow one around as they move. Ideally, the creators want to conjure up a beamforming system that is easy to configure and relatively inexpensive, but we're hearing (ahem) that it'll be at least three years before these aural luxuries break into the corporate sphere.

So for the first time in its 15 year history, Microsoft Research's TechFest showcase for internal R&D projects was opened to the public. We headed up to Redmond to check out what some of the Microsoft engineers were working on behind the scenes, some of which went live as products, some of which we won't see for years, and some of which we may never see productized at all. We understand there's still some more internal-only TechFest stuff going down this week, but check out our gallery from some of the wacky concepts, prototypes, and products we think you'll get into.