Here at the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft has been kind enough to take us and a number of administrators of Featured Communities around to a series of labs helping get us a sneak peek at Windows Vista.

As an encore, Microsoft got us a bunch of VIP passes to Bill Gates' keynote address very close to the front row.  Alas, Las Vegas traffic conspired against the shuttle that we were all in and the seats were opened to others and we lost them.  But just when we thought we were going to be stuck in the nosebleed section, PowerUser.TV's Kristin Hatcher came up with another idea -- Hanging out at the Microsoft private suite which, quite unlike the auditorium, had food and drink. Great food and drink in fact.  Kristin was able to persaude Microsoft's community relations team (who have been awesome on this trip) into letting us watch the keynote from there. 

So many of us saw the keynote from the comfort of a quiet private suite eating shrimp, crab legs, and drinking margaritas.  

Tonight at CES Microsoft announced the DreamScene Ultimate Extra.

DreamScene is a new feature designed for Windows Vista Ultimate users that enables them to display high-definition video content as their desktop background.

Users of Windows Vista Ultimate will be able to download it from "Ultimate Extras".  Moreover, Microsoft has tapped WinCustomize.com as the premier repository for DreamScene content distribution and content by end users. The gallery and landing page will officially go live by the time Windows Vista Ultimate becomes generally available.

Stardock Design produced all of the non-photographic based DreamScene content.  In addition, Stardock has been developing enhancements and tools to extend the capabilities of Windows DreamScene.

More information can be found at the link below.

As Microsoft just announced, one of the first Ultimate Extras (extra features users of Windows Vista Ultimate can download) is a new animated wallpaper feature called "Windows DreamScene".

So what exactly is Windows DreamScene? And what are the extensions and enhancements coming out for it?

Windows DreamScene is an animated wallpaper technology developed by Microsoft that plays high-definition video content as your wallpaper. The key ability of it is that it can do so without using significant amounts of CPU (basically the decoding of the video is the only real CPU use involved).  The animation itself is run through the hardware accelerated DWM.

Software developer Stardock, makers of popular desktop enhancement utilities such as WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectDock, etc. worked with Microsoft on the creation of content and has developed a number of tools to extend the feature set of Windows DreamScene. 

On the content side, Stardock Design created a number of 3D animated content for Microsoft including the default animated Aurora. Microsoft is holding back on releasing all the content they have until Spring 2007.  Stardock also added support for animated wallpapers on its popular WinCustomize.com community site at Dream.WinCustomize.com.

With regards to the additonal tools and enhancements Stardock has released two of them.

The first enhancement is a new program called DeskScapes.  DeskScapes extends DreamScenes to support dynamic content (i.e. videos are pre-rendered).  With dynamic content, you could have your wallpaper change based on weather, time of day, or news.  Or you could just have some cool Direct3D "stuff" that runs (like one of those fish aquariums running as your wallpaper). 

The other key feature of DeskScapes is that it introduces the .DREAM format. This allows artists to protect their artwork.  The .DREAM format supports triggers (changing what is playing based on specific triggers) and it allows creators to insert their author info and a link to their website which we think is crucial to encourage artists to spend the time to create good animated wallpapers.

The other tool Stardock is working on is tentatively called Dream Maker. What it does is make it easy for authors to create .Dream files.  Its goal will be to help make it as easy as possible to create your own animated wallpapers.

To learn more about Windows Vista Ultimate, go to www.windowsultimate.com. To download content to personalize your Windows Vista experience, visit www.wincustomize.com.

Get More Dreams (animated wallpapers): Dream.WinCustomize.Com

Screenshots:

(1) Dyanmic content uses virtually no CPU, it's all on the video card. (2) DreamScene in action. (3) .Dream Files support author info.

ATI (now owned by AMD) talked to us for a bit today and we learned a lot of very insightful things that I don't think you'll hear about in press releases.

The first thing has to do with the power use in Windows Vista.  The gotcha of the Aero UI is power user. In our benchmarks on Dell and Lenova laptops, having Aero running cost us between 20 and 45 minutes in battery life. That's huge. We'll be talking about that more soon.  AMD says they are working on their drivers to address that as much as possible. They have a feature called "PowerPlay" that they are implementing to try to reduce power consumption.

The second thing that ATI confirmed to a direct question I asked on the subject is whether gamers can expect to eventually buy video cards that are external to the PC. I mean literally, a second box that you plug in to the wall that handles the graphics for your computer.  This is something that would be available specificlaly for the high end user who wants the absolute best performance.

...More WinCustomize CES coverage...

Where can you get your CES coverage?

If you're remotely into computers, you definitely want to pay attention to this year's CES. This is a huge event for computing and there's some exciting stuff.

Here are three places I recommend to get your stuff:

• BetaNews
• WinCustomize
• Neowin.Net

AMD/ATI are showing off their latest goodies for Windows Vista along with their plans for a "true" Quadcore.

Intel's Quadcore is basically two DualCores taped together into a single chip.  AMD is working on a quadcore where each core is truly independent and has a single large shared cache.

They also talked a lot about OCUR which will become publicly announced in its final form in a few hours.

One of the demos Microsoft had for us was to show us wher they're going with Maps.Live.com

The part that got interesting for me was that they're putting together tools to make it easier for on-line communities to create 3D models for buildings in their area.

While Google Maps does let certain places be showin in 3D, what Microsoft is doing seems to be the next level -- open it up and try it yourself.

Meetiing with the Microsoft Live team today. It's been very interesting.

Microsoft has a very cool little tool on Live.com that is still in beta. But it will make it easy for people using Live Instant Messenger to find the location of their various contacts and help organize a get together or whatever. You can try it out here:

http://dev.live.com/mashups/partycrasher/

Most of what they mentioned is under NDA but they are doing a lot of cool mapping stuff. They also wanted to remind the world that Microsoft has been doing on-line mapping and virtual earth stuff for a very long time.

It's like being a kid in a candy store. 

Two days from morning to late night meeting with people from Microsoft. Big kudos to Microsoft's Nick White for putting together these meetings as it's been incredibly educational.

See the link below for the latest info.

Fun with USB flash drives

One of the neat demos Microsoft gave was how easy it is in Windows Vista to share a network connection. If you have a net connection, you can plug in a USB key and you can turn it into a quasi-wireless share device. Then hand it over to other people and once they plug in that USB key, the auto-run on it will set up the network connection automatically.

You could imagine how easy that would make getting a LAN game going or something. You could share connections under XP, but it was a lot more tedious. This, by contrast, was incredibly easy.