Users can dump photos from their digital cameras onto the computer and use the touch screen to arrange them into boxes. They can also place objects, such as mementos from a vacation, onto the screen, and a built-in overhead camera snaps a photo of the objects. That way people can integrate not just digital photos but physical items into the machine, Kirk said.

He and his team have built three of the tables and placed them in people’s homes to study how they use them. One newly married couple had a collection of notes that people who attended their wedding had written on the wrappers of a piece of chocolate left at each person’s table. They were worried about how to best keep the notes and used the Microsoft device to take photos of each piece of paper and collect them, along with wedding photos, in a file.

Another family found that their 6-year-old son liked to take photos of his toy dinosaurs, arranging them in collections.

One of Kirk’s colleagues has helped develop TimeCard, software that could help people develop a timeline history of their families or themselves. Richard Banks, the researcher demonstrating the project, showed off one that he’d created for his grandfather, who had been in the Royal Air Force during the second World War. The timeline included not just photos of his grandfather, but also general historical information about what was going on in the world at the same time as each photo was taken.

Banks envisions creating a more standardized way for people to create such a timeline for themselves, maybe collecting items that a person writes on Twitter or on blogs and helping to collate those items in a coherent way that shows what kinds of things were important to the person at a certain time period.