The keen eyes over at ZDNet caught onto the fact that a “core contributor” to the Kinect has left Microsoft to join up with Google. Mary Jo Foley noticed that Johnny Chung Lee’s web site changed to cite that he is now a “Rapid Evaluator” at Google:

In a January 18 blog post, Lee acknowledged he had switched horses. From that post:

“Very recently, I have left Microsoft to join a special projects team at Google. After more than 2 and a half years working as a core contributor to the human tracking algorithms for Kinect, it was an extremely difficult decision and I leave behind many great colleagues in Redmond.”

At Microsoft, Lee was a researcher in the Microsoft Applied Sciences group, chartered with exploring “novel input and output devices that can improve interaction with computing technology.” He helped advise direction on existing hardware product lines and developed prototypes of new form factors. Lee holds several patents and has applications in for more.

It’s anybody’s guess what Google wants him to do, but looking at his resume there’s a great deal of amazing stuff that he’s been involved in, including Brain Computer Interface, Kinetic Typography: affective expression with animated text (i.e. kind of moving text to affect emotions in viewers), and even a haptic pen interface. It seems that he’s very big on human-computer interfacing.

Google itself is basically a human-computer interface—as much as they’re a human-human interface that filters and clusters knowledge—a great deal of the search-giant’s approach to the world has been how to digitize experience in such a way that it can be delivered and accessed by more people. Lee appears to have done a good deal of work on how humans interact with computers.

Does this mean that Google wants to tap his ideas on using cameras to better interface people with knowledge? We’ve certainly seen Google get big on OCR when they started their Google Books push and 3D scanning software when they started rolling out the Google Streetview car, so they have a long way to go when it comes to developing imaging and digitization that Lee appears well suited for.

We could spin the Wheel of Speculation at this point, but Lee’s move from Microsoft to Google seems to suggest more of the same fun innovations for Google rather than any distinct direction. Maybe we could look at the big, bad history of the search giant’s appetite for innovation.