The release this week of the Windows 8.1 Update added a number of new features to the OS, mostly for keyboard and mouse users. This week, the Microsoft Research team posted information about a project describing a possible future update for Windows 8 that involves interactive live tiles for its Start screen.

Unfortunately, the company has since pulled those pages from the Microsoft Research site, but Microsoft-News notes that WindowsBlogItalia has since uploaded the three videos that accompanied the pages to their YouTube channel. The first video shows a member of Microsoft Research Asia showing a demo of the interactive live titles. The titles can be touched to view and move an email message list in the Mail live tile, It also shows that even the desktop tile in the Start screen can be modified to show a clock, which programs are running in the desktop UI and more.

The second video shows off even more of the interactive live tiles, including how they can be expanded to show play lists, an actual working calculator inside the Windows 8 Start screen and more.

Finally, the third video shows how interactive live tiles could be used by a person at work with Windows 8. At one point, the person uses his Windows Phone and brings it to the monitor running the Windows 8 Start screen to bring up a message notification in the live tile inside the smartphone. It's currently unknown why Microsoft Research posted this information to the public site and then removed it.

Source: Microsoft-News and WindowsBlogItalia on YouTube