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Lucid Touch, one of the technologies under development at Microsoft, allows users of touch-screen devices such as GPS units or mobile phones to perform touch-screen operations from behind the device so their actions do not block their view. The device uses a camera mounted behind the unit, but researchers hope to eventually integrate the necessary sensors into the back panel of the the device.

SEATTLE — Over the last 16 years, Microsoft has hired many of the world's best computer scientists and told them to follow their curiosity with no worries about profits or deadlines. There are now more than 800 Ph.D.s working at seven sites around the world.

Many of the 150 projects on display recently on the Redmond, Wash., campus focus on Internet search, an area where Microsoft trails Google.

GeoLife, a project from Microsoft's lab in Beijing, uses mobile devices and cameras enabled with global positioning systems to automatically create a log and multimedia presentation chronicling a person's travels through a city. The log is displayed on a map that could be shared with a friend.

Blews is an Internet tool that tracks political news stories generating the strongest responses from bloggers. The software tracks whether responses come from liberal or conservative blogs and analyzes blog text to determine whether a story is firing up the right or the left.

WorldWide Telescope is an Internet application due in spring that stitches together images from telescopes around the world to give the fullest picture yet of the night sky. Users will be able to zoom in on any point in the sky, discovering distant galaxies that only astronomers see now on a regular basis.