A new project from Office Labs has just been unveiled: Touchless, a multitouch software app and SDK that lets you create and experience multi-touch applications of your own...with no need for expensive hardware or software. The way it does that is with the use of a standard computer webcam and colored markers that are defined by the user. These “markers” can be anything you want – just so long as you can hold them in your hands. Or, heck, the markers can even be your fingers themselves.

Sound familiar? Probably because it’s very much like Cam-Trax, which I mentioned earlier this year.  The difference is that unlike Cam-Trax, with Touchless there is an open source application and SDK available, which anyone can see, use, and contribute to. (Video after the jump)

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The amazing WorldWide Telescope got a lot of hype pre-launch but you haven’t heard much about in recent days. Although now the WWT is being used by a number of astronomers, scientists, students, and space enthusiasts across the globe, the Microsoft Virtual Earth team decided to give it a little more exposure to the general public. To do so, they’re going to include a little WWT in Virtual Earth. According to Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth data centers host all of the data for WWT and the Earth in WWT is actually made of Virtual Earth tiles. So, in latest release of the Virtual Earth 3D control, the Virtual Earth team has now included the accurate placement of stars in space. Cool - now we have Earth and Sky in VE!

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In case you hadn’t heard, Live Search has just now been integrated into one of the biggest social networks in the world: Facebook. As Facebook announced on their blog, this is the “first step in giving you the ability to find content from across the web while using Facebook.” What this means is that when you’re doing a search on Facebook, you’ll now see the option to “Search Facebook” or “Search the Web.” This a big deal for those of you who live your entire lives on Facebook – now you can find the additional information you need without having to leave the site. One thing you may have noticed, as those over at VentureBeat did, the Facebook-flavored Live Search results appear somewhat different than the same query performed on www.live.com. According to a statement from Facebook, that’s because Facebook removes sponsored results (those results which people have paid for) in addition to using a few different filters, according to the company.

What’s really exciting, though, is that this is only the first step involving the integration of Live Search and Facebook, according to Agnus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search Product Management: “As we evaluate user feedback and results we'll explore additional ways to integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience.”

What do you think of the Live Search integration? You can communicate to the team directly on, where else? – their Facebook page.

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In the new version of Internet Explorer, IE8 (still in beta), there’s a new feature called “accelerators.” With accelerators, you can get easy access to online services like email, search, maps, eBay, Encarta, facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and so much more all from the web page you’re on – no need to open another tab or window and navigate elsewhere. Now, in addition to the accelerators currently available from the IE8 accelerator gallery, other developers are creating their own accelerators and posting them to their blogs.

One new accelerator that I recently came across is the Zune accelerator created by Sean Alexander. This particular accelerator lets you look up music-related info like Artist or Song info in the Zune Marketplace, all from the right-click menu. He mentions there are other accelerators that do similar things, but they are broken out to look up Artist separately from Song; this one combines both into one. Nice! To install Sean’s Zune accelerator click here.

The upcoming My Movies plugin for Windows Home Server has a lot of people excited. Already available for Windows Media Center users, the plugin will soon allow Home Server users to organize their extensive movie collections and use their Home Server as more of a media server. According to a new post on the We Got Served blog, the plugin will function as a standard server for My Movies clients, will include an automated “Disc Copier,” will automatically monitor movie folders added to or located on a WHS share, and will function as a metadata provider without the need for a My Movies client for Microsoft DVD library, Niveus Movie Library, Open Media Library, Media Portal, and hopefully soon XBMC. The plugin isn’t available in its final form just yet, but if you just can’t wait to try it out, a pre-release version is now available for download from here.

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