Last week, Sun Labs held its annual Research Open House. It was a two-day event in Menlo Park: the first day was for Sun employees and the second day was for press & analysts.

This was Sunfleet’s debut onto the Open House scene and we had a great time, giving a group talk entitled “Design and Engineering: An Emerging Culture of Collaboration” and presenting demos of the Media Affinity Browser and our Hole in Space and Constellation projects

One of the tangible outcomes was some positive press on our projects! Very exciting, given our size and short history at Sun. And, as reflected in the headlines, Sun needs some positive energy out there in the media world.

Here are the highlights:

RED HERRING: Sun’s Idea Factory soldiers on:

Sun also is developing media interfaces that go beyond “list-based” menus. The Media Affinity Browser uses bubble charts and boxes to find movies or programs, while Search Inside The Music uses sound analysis—such as the timbre of instruments—to help an aficionado find new artists. Both could one day be licensed to software makers or content providers.

CNET: Sun Labs pushes forward despite l*yoffs:

Researchers showed off a concept for a media browser, a search application that would let home users find movie titles, for example, based on factors that they control. “We want to avoid list-based interfaces. Lists do not scale,” said Scott Nazarian, a company researcher. The basic idea is to let couch potatoes surf across a grid of movies sorted by genre and labeled with visual cues, and then let people select a particular movie based on how it matches up with preset criteria.

The company is also working on a combination social-networking/video-conferencing application that would let colleagues interact over high-resolution video screens like they were meeting in the hallway, said Joan DiMicco, a Sun researcher. The project is still being fleshed out, but two people on opposite ends of a video-conferencing application could access a social-networking map that plays “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with fellow employees. For example, the application showed how Sun researchers were connected to each other by where they sit, what projects they’ve worked on, or patents they have filed.