The 2010 edition of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) will officially start tomorrow, but today we were invited to a media-only presentation of the latest research being conducted at Intel Labs, all aimed to new usages of computing.

It is always important to remember that Intel is a chip company and does not develop or sell consumer electronics products. However, they employ a full-time staff of researchers to better understand the trends and needs in technology, so they can develop the supporting chips that may be, in the future, used by other companies that want to go ahead and put the ideas presented by Intel on the market.

We saw demos for the following ideas:

• A photo-recognition system for smart phones
• The ability to run programs (“apps”) on your TV at the same time you watch live shows
• A projected screen on your kitchen countertop that responds to the touch and is capable to recognize objects on the countertop and interact accordingly
• A face-recognition system implemented inside a car, allowing the car to automatically load the driver’s preferred settings, and also to identify if the driver is sleepy or driving in an unsafe manner
• Using the embedded camera of netbooks for activities with early elementary students

Let’s talk about the first three on this list.