Of the 150-odd demos in TechFest 2009, the best-named is Digital Past to Digital Presence, a collection of concepts from the Socio-Digital Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. David Kirk, a post-doctoral researcher in the group, explains what ties the technologies together.

"Both bits of the booth are connecting with something's that's absent, somebody you can't be with, bringing things closer to together," he says. "With Digital Past, it's bringing you closer to your past, in two different ways. With Digital Presence, it's connecting with people you can't physically be with. In both cases, they're connecting with bits of your life that are distant in some way and bringing them together."

The demo features four discrete attempts to bridge these physical and temporal gaps: Family Archive, Time Card, CellFrame, and Wayve.

• Family Archive: a table-like device with a screen built into the table top and a standard USB connection for peripherals, used for media management in the home.

"At least that's where we started," Kirk says. "It's always on, touch-interactive, multitouch display. We've built three of them and deployed them in family homes for a month at a time. We envision a world where you walk up, put a pen drive in, and content spills out into it. Once you've got digital content in, you can create containers for it.

"One of the things we're particularly interested in doing is to allow people to combine not only already-digital stuff, but to give them interesting ways of digitizing physical stuff that otherwise might not get integrated with those digital things. It's all about creating rich collections of media."

To that end, the Family Archive includes a camera stand on one side of the table that can photograph physical objects placed on the display and capture an image that can be added to a themed digital container, from, say, a vacation. The objects are rendered on a blank background to establish them as separate entities from other things that might be on the screen when the image is taken.

"You can have this integrated, easily digitized collection of all the photos you've taken, ticket stubs, postcards you might have bought," Kirk says, "and have a much richer archive of memories."

Further explorations of the concept could extend to 3-D capture of physical objects.

• Time Card: "We're basically looking at ways of creating timelines," says Richard Banks, an interaction designer at the Cambridge lab, "to either represent your own life or lives of others. We have two key scenarios. One is the creation of timelines as a form of memorial for somebody's who's passed away. In this case, this is my grandfather, who left me a suitcase full of photos. I'm going through those photos and scanning them and adding metadata in order to create a timeline so I can better understand what it was he did during his life, as well as, to some extent, to honor him. It's like making a photo album about him.

"The second scenario we're interested in is about creating timelines on the fly about your own online activities. Our long-term goal is to ask: If you record these things about what you did, how will they impact you in 20 or 30 years?  Wouldn't it be interesting, for example, to record the Twitter feeds you're creating now, so that in 20 years' time you can look back on them and reflect on what interested you. One of my goals with Time Card will be to create an object that for 40 years was recording my life and the things I was doing online, and at the end of my life, it could literally be unplugged and given to my daughter as an heirloom."

Currently, the Time Card focus is on archiving images and text. But, as Banks says, "that doesn't mean we're just talking about photos. Some of the content that I have in here are physical objects, like my grandfather's ribbon from when he was a pilot in the Second World War. Here's a letter about his deployment, and here's an insignia from the squadron that he was in. Although it's about imagery, it's about different kinds of imagery that come together to tell a story."

In incorporating images of physical objects, Time Card resembles Family Archive. That, Banks says, is deliberate.

"This general theme we're interested in," he says, "we're calling technology heirlooms. It's about just looking at technology generally and saying: 'What about 30 years' time? Where will this be? Who will care about it? What will people want to do with it?' "

• CellFrame: a small, standalone, wireless display and communication device to bring the benefits of social networking to those not actively participating in it.

"There are certain people who might have access to the Internet and certainly might not have a wireless network at home," says Sian Lindley, currently a vendor working with the Socio-Digital Systems group. "but whom you might want to include in social networking."

The device consists of a phone in a frame. Those not inclined to adopt the latest technological trends could put such a device in their home and receive content sent to them. The scenario shown during TechFest displays a family social network, with channels for family members. By using touch input, family members could share content by dragging it across the display and dropping it onto another channel. Additional functionality enables a user to respond to received content via a simple user interface.

"It's just a very simple way," Lindley says, "of seeing who it is, not using the Internet, but still getting some of that information you might otherwise not get."

• Wayve: another device, resembling a digital picture frame but incorporating technology that lets people connect playfully and creatively.

"This is like a digital sticky note," Lindley says. "I can create a message to be on display for my family, and I might leave this device somewhere like the kitchen where everyone's going to see it at a glance. It's connected wirelessly to the Internet, so I can also send and receive messages."

Wayve can send a photo to an e-mail address or a photo message to a mobile phone--or to another Wayve.

"What we expected," Lindley says, "is that this might be useful for household messaging, like 'I'm going to be late,' or to ask what was for dinner. But what we found when we deployed these was that people used it in creative and expressive ways. You can do things like play tic-tac-toe. People would do things like take pictures of their dogs and send them to their friends, and the friends would draw hats on the dogs and send them back.

"Just kind of playful, simple, expressive things as a way of connecting families."