Yesterday at the Seattle Interactive Conference downtown, I went down to the basement a few times to check in on the Gnomedex stage, which organizer Chris Pirillo filled with some great speakers throughout the day, true to form. (In fact, it’s really too bad the Gnomedex content wasn’t more easily accessible to regular SIC attendees, but that’s another topic.)

The final Gnomedex speaker of the day was Microsoft’s Loke-Uei Tan, a senior technical product manager in the company’s Robotics Division, which is making a new push to encourage development of robots for consumer applications in the home.

Before he went on stage, he introduced us to “Robarazzi,” a prototype created by Microsoft Robotics developer Greg Shirakyan to demonstrate some of the things possible with the company’s Robotics Developer Studio 4 development platform.

Roborazzi (as in robot paparazzi) is an automated party photographer. It uses a Kinect sensor to identify people in a room, roll up to them and snap their picture, after telling them to “Say Cheeeeese!” The photos it takes are automatically uploaded to a Flickr photostream. It also recognizes its name and responds to basic voice commands, such as “look at me” and “take a picture.”

As indicated by the Robotics Studio version number, Microsoft has been pursuing this robotics thing for quite a few years. Bill Gates last week told University of Washington students not to underestimate the potential of robotics, even if the consumer applications haven’t materialized as quickly as some might have hoped.

The longtime champion of robotics inside the company, early Microsoft employee Tandy Trower, has left the company to work on his own venture, Hoaloha Robotics, which is exploring the use of robots as assistive caregivers.

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