Matthew MacLaurin is a Principal Program Manager in the creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research.
In his five years at Microsoft he has worked in children's programming, search UI, user interface design for Vista, and exploring new models for storage and sharing in an online social world.
Boku is a game authoring system for children (and the childlike) with a novel visual programming system designed around a concurrent rule system. It is inspired by seminal end-user creative tools such as Logo and HyperCard. Creation and play are seamlessly interwoven in an coherent and responsive user experience.
Windows Vista was the most significant makeover of the Windows User Interface in a decade. Matt ran the user interface strategy group in the Windows design organization, looking at technical and design barriers to advancing the art of the Windows experience. This included participation in numerous "billg reviews" to present and defend various aspects of the Longhorn and Vista user interface designs. As an outgrowth of this work, he managed part of a cross-department development team for Casino, an advanced desktop search client featuring natural language query syntax and pluggable federated search. Much of this work has been incorporated in the upcoming Windows release, Windows 7.
Prior to Vista, MacLaurin led the design and development of Tesla, a more forward looking desktop storage client that anticipated sharing and cloud services as intrinsic aspects of the storage experience. In Tesla, users operate on queries as first class objects, using them to create outbound sharing streams and notification affordances to keep track of changes in their documents, email, or feeds.
Sapphire was a an attempt to complete re-imagine the desktop experience, positioning the Windows shell as a proactive collaborator rather than a passive servant. Sapphire monitored hundreds of different user events in an attempt to model and anticipate the user's needs - such as documents that are often opened together, or applications that are frequently launched alongside different web sites.
MacLaurin spent two years in the wilds of Spokane as a developer on Cyan's Myst Online / Uru project. There he wrote the avatar animation and motion blending system and built the distributed physics layer.
Between 1994 and 2000, MacLaurin founded and ran a successful interactive media consulting agency conducting advanced research and product development for clients such as New Line Cinema, Apple, Creative Systems, MCA, Silicon Graphics, Thorne EMI, Paramount, Dreamworks, Capitol Records and Virgin Interactive, including the brand introduction campaign for Mac OS, the first large-scale social media systems for the music industry, and advanced character animation systems for 3D environments.
Between 1988 and 1994, MacLaurin worked as a senior engineer / scientist at Apple Computer where he studied advanced interactive media authoring environments, invented a new formal grammar for user interface, and wrote a markup-driven (1992) user interface framework for the Dylan-based version of Newton - one of the first consumer-focused operating systems written in managed code.
MacLaurin is named on over 60 patent applications in areas ranging from search user interface, automated UI analysis, to online collaborative systems.
