SAN FRANCISCO—While much of this morning's keynote at Microsoft's Build developer conference here was focused on the visuals of Windows 10, the company's executives less-than-subtly highlighted a number of Windows and Azure cloud technologies focused on a class of computing devices that will never display the Windows "Start" bar: smart, screenless networked devices that are usually categorized as the "Internet of Things" (IoT). The promotion of free Windows 10 for embedded devices is part of Microsoft's goal of a worldwide installed base of 1 billion Windows 10 devices within the next few years, but Microsoft also sees IoT as a major driver of growth for Azure and Windows Holographic.

During a demonstration of HoloLens, Microsoft's Alex Kipman and a member of the HoloLens team demonstrated an Arduino-based robot enhanced by services tied to Windows Holographic and the HoloLens. The robot demo included pop-up 3-D interfaces for both the features of the physical robot and a "holographic" extension of the robot existing only in software.

HoloLens also provided terrain mapping and obstacle recognition from the perspective of the robot's operator, creating way-points for the very simple robot to navigate to avoid Kipman as he stepped into its original path. These sorts of navigational capabilities, which are inherent to the spatial computing and sensor processing of Windows Holographic, could potentially be used for more autonomous systems coupled with Kinect sensors or other sensor hardware.

But that's hardly the limit of Microsoft's IoT ambitions, particularly with devices such as the latest Raspberry Pi slated for Windows 10 support and the push by Microsoft to get developers to use Azure as the back-end for embedded computing applications. Microsoft released a preview of the IoT version of Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi yesterday. Meanwhile, while Microsoft has been touting Azure back-end services as "IoT services," the company's promised IoT-specific toolkit for Azure is not yet publicly available.

Microsoft announced its Azure IoT Suite last month at Microsoft Convergence 2015 in Atlanta. Some elements of the suite have been discussed here at Build, but preview code won't be available until later this year. One of the promised components of IoT Suite is IoT Hub, a "service-assisted communications" platform for low-cost networked sensors, telematics, and other applications where large numbers of low-cost networked devices need to communicate telemetry and other data securely to an enterprise back end or to each other.

IoT Hub will provide a secure communications channel for networked devices based on HTTPS. Initially, it will use X.509 certificates, but later versions will provide TLS pre-shared key (PSK) and Raw Public Key (RPK) encryption, according to a presentation today by Microsoft Azure architect Clemens Vesters. IoT Hub will also manage the registration and authentication of up to millions of IoT devices, and federate identity of the devices with Microsoft Active Directory.