Future tech

According to USA Today, True hipsters include gizmos of 2010 on their wish lists. There is a nice summary of potential futur gizmos.

• Like, maybe a translating digital camera. (…) There’s actually a working prototype in Hewlett-Packard’s labs.
• Personal Smart Stuff Technology (PSST). Open a box of PSST, and you’d find sheets of dot-size stickers, each embedded with a tiny RFID chip that can store a few bits of data and transmit it wirelessly. You’d also find a half-dozen or so RFID readers to place around the house to tie in with your wireless network. You put the stickers on things — your iPod, key chain, jacket, notebook
  and so on. On your home computer, you enter some information that corresponds with the sticker on each item — perhaps what the item is and some instructions. Maybe you tell PSST that if it senses that your jacket (presumably with you in it) leaves the house but your keys are still on the kitchen counter, PSST should send a text message to your cell phone, giving you the number of a good locksmith.In essence, your stuff would be on your home network, much as Web pages are on the Internet. “I want everything I own to be indexible,”
• The Mach-X ND Razor (never get dull or corrode, One blade for the whole of a man’s
  shaving life) and Never-Smell Sox.
• Subscription robots. Start with something like Sony’s Aibo robot dog — but a more advanced version, with excellent speech recognition and a wireless Internet connection. (…) A “toy” for your kid that can download and deliver content and services
  from the Net
• Personal theater. A cell phone that’s also an MP3 player is cool this year. A cell phone that can download and play movies on a tiny screen will be cool next year. By 2010, you’ll want a cell phone that can deliver a complete surround-sound home theater experience, says Padmasree Warrior, Motorola’s chief technology officer.
• …

Why do I blog this? Of course, it’s like scifi or crazy stuff from the future, but the interesting point here is that those gizmos are coming out of existing research lab in the US. It’s nice to see what’s done there, even though it’s not so precise and there is no picture.

A huge hole in the ground in Lausanne

Thanks to 24heures.ch, Pictures from the hole in the ground (due to the construction of the underground metro):

A Samsung\'s mobile phone with haptic capabilities

According to gamasutra, Samsung is planning to release a new mobile-related games product this year in Europe.

According to Park, “There will be a games product and service this year, though not necessarily in a games-specific form factor. Functionality such as 3D does not now require a dedicated handset and can now be found in regular form factors.” Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the new device will be aimed more at the mobile phone/N-Gage market than the PSP or Game Boy.

In other Samsung news, the company has licensed haptics-related ‘force feedback’ technology from San Jose-based Immersion Corp., best known for recently winning a court case against Sony over patents that the Dual Shock controllers had violated.

The haptics technology will debut in some Samsung phones next month, and a New Scientist report points out: “These devices give you a sense of how good a virtual golfing shot was from the force feedback, or let you feel how close you are to being run off the road in racing games”, meaning it’s possible that future Samsung mobile game products could use haptics as a significant part of gameplay.

Why do I blog this? Well things are going to become interesting if we have more and more competitors in the field of mobile-phone-merged-with-portable-consoles! Among the diversity we can expect something cool to emerge. Samsung begins to be a really amazing companies, definitely a serious competor for Nokia. I mean, in terms of innovation, it’s becoming more and more ahead of the curve.

The future of location-based experiences

Steve Benford (University of Nottingham’s
Mixed Reality Laboratory) recently wrote a JISC Technology and Standards Watch report called Future location-based experiences which is of great interest for people into the locative media area.

This Technology Watch report considers the relevance of location-based experiences to education, discussing potential applications, reviewing the underlying technologies and identifying key challenges for the future.

The research community has already demonstrated a variety of location-based experiences that are of relevance to education including: information services and tour-guides in which information is delivered in situ; educational games in which a combination of mobile and online users learn together; support for field trips in which the technology provides access to learning materials during a visit to a site of special historical or scientific interest; and support for field science in which learners actively gather data from the environment for subsequent analysis back at base.
(…)
This report concludes that location-based experiences could indeed introduce significant benefits for education in schools, colleges and universities, especially when they connect location-specific data delivery and capture to subsequent reflection and abstraction back in the ‘classroom’. However, some serious challenges need to be met first. Technical challenges include dealing with the uncertainty of positioning and connectivity and also supporting interoperability between the very diverse set of technologies involved, in particular by developing flexible middleware support. Organisational challenges involve addressing serious privacy concerns, integration with current e-learning services and dealing with the potential culture clash involved in encouraging widespread use of mobile devices in educational environments. Recommendations are for the educational community to conduct a series of pilot experiments on different wireless test-beds while consulting closely with users and their representatives over privacy issues and with mobile operators about future service provision.

The report covers pretty well the are of location-based services, offering interesting insights related to potential challenges. It a good compendium to the last Communication of the ACM issue I mentionned last week.

Heads in Geneva

Sketch maps as an indicator of internal cognitive maps

A very informative paper by Mark Billinghurst and Suzanne Weghorst about the use of sketch maps to provide a measure of internal cognitive maps of virtual environment. The Use of Sketch Maps to Measure Cognitive Maps of Virtual Environments.

Cognitive maps are mental models of the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in spatial environments. Understanding how people form cognitive maps of virtual environments is vital to effective virtual world design. Unfortunately, such an understanding is hampered by the difficulty of cognitive map measurement. The present study tests the validity of using sketch maps to examine aspects of virtual world cognitive maps. We predict that subjects who report feeling oriented within the virtual world will produce better sketch maps and so sketch map accuracy can be used as an external measure of subject orientation and world knowledge. Results show a high positive correlation between subjective ratings of orientation, world knowledge and sketch map accuracy, supporting our hypothesis that sketch maps provide a valid measure of internal cognitive maps of virtual environments. Results across different worlds also suggest that sketch maps can be used to find an absolute measure for goodness of world design.

Why do I blog this? I am wondering if there are connected studies in the real world. Is a sketch map also a good indicator of the internal cognitive map of the physical environment?

A lab to keep an eye on : Minatec ideas lab

Minatec‘s Ideas Laboratory (Grenoble, France) seems to have a smart agenda:

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is a laboratory dedicated to design of new products and services using micro and nanotechnologies. Its approach is based on a rigorous creative process integrating validation of the concepts by the users at a very early stage.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is composed of teams from widely varying backgrounds: scientists from numerous fields (including human sciences such as sociology, anthropology or ergonomics) rub shoulders with technologists and users of all ages.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory

• creates a place for exchanges and collaborative multidisciplinary work
• innovates by interaction between different professions and technologies
• verifies the value of use and the economic value of the new objects and services

Located in the heart of the MINATEC excellence centre, the laboratory benefits from resources at the leading edge of research in the micro and nanotechnologies sector.

MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory is a joint venture by the Grenoble CEA Leti, ST Microelectronics and France Telecom R&D. Around the core formed by these three founders, the laboratory is progressively opening up to other partners, industrialists and research organisations.

Mobile services and physical closeness

It’s 3 years old but still very up-to-date from my point of view: Marko Athisaari’s talk at Doors of Perception 7: here are few quotes I found relevant:

My topic is proximity. By proximity, I mean, quite simply, physical closeness; and many among you will ask, “How close is close?” But I mean the stuff that happens between the one-to-ten centimetres range and room-size interaction, and what people do, what kind of activities they undertake in that kind of space. (…) four kinds of services and product services value that people might get in physical closeness:

1. People in places: while we talk about devices being connected, and everything being connected in a technological sense, social interaction will be a prime driver in the future as well, even in technologically enhanced social interaction. By this, I don’t mean that we’ll supplant very good ways of communicating, like me speaking to you one-to-many now, but that other forms of communication overlay it – if there’s wireless coverage, you could be maybe discussing what I’m saying among yourselves. (…) he simplest and most important one, which has immediate implications and is quite near in the technological roadmap, is sharing different kinds of digital items, whether they’re personally created or otherwise, in physical closeness. We know from evidence in Japan where, for example, imaging phones have been around for quite a while, that across the table people won’t send the image across the cellular network, they prefer to show it on the device.
2. My things with me: We know that mobile portable products and appliances are very much linked to personal and intimate items, the kinds of things that one has an emotional relationship with. One can see that the relationship of people with their phone books is far from rational. (…) This includes not only items like a phone book or co-ordinates for other people in our social network, but also our personal and intimate media, like photographs. They need to be stored somewhere close by;
3. Enhanced Spaces: means content, digital content that’s local, related to this space, or the shopping environment. [the classical location based services postit like? nicolas]
4. Safe Consumption refers to the fact that in physical proximity, a lot of issues concerning trust and security are tacitly taken care of .

Why do I blog this? I guess it’s a smart summary of proximity-based services, dealing with various dimensions (like safety or belongings).

What about VoGPRS

Via Gabriel Kent.Maybe I am a bit late on this very concept. Seems interesting, Voice Over General Packet Radio Service could be seen as:

Of course we see Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) movement in the mobile space with the creation of WIFI Phones and such — however, we are also seeing some take advantage of the rich toolkits already offered by many smart phones (Pocket PC/Palm/Symbian etc Phones) to create VOIP capability. Nonetheless, most of this movement is focused on VOIP and therefore WIFI as some of these smart phones are equipped with WIFI chipsets.

While VOGPRS is not that far of a stretch from this current industry focus, it nonetheless opens the door for current (and near future) smart phones to take advantage of cheap voice calls to anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world (where GPRS is available) and not be confined to small WIFI spaces.

While GPRS has a theoretical maximum of 171.2 Kbps, I usually obtain about 100 Kbps over Verizon’s GPRS network. Following my previous work with CELP, I can tell you a 16 Kbps voice stream sounds quite intelligible. Assuming 32 Kbps is required (bi-directional voice streams) for our conversation, then it would most likely hold up well even while driving down the freeway.

From R&D to \"Connect and Develop\"

(via) More than the sum of its parts by John Bessant: I am a bit late commenting this September 2004 column from the Financial Times. However it reminds me a report produced by the Institute For the Future called “Shape Shifting in the World of R&D” (I advise you to read it carefully). One of their claim was that social networks will support new R&D forms. That is also what the FT author states:

In the 21st century, innovation involves trying to deal with an extended and rapidly advancing scientific frontier, fragmenting markets, political uncertainties, regulatory instabilities and competitors who are increasingly coming from unexpected directions. The response has to be one of spreading the net wide and trying to make use of a broad set of knowledge signals. In other words, learning to manage innovation at a network level. (…) Even the largest and most established innovators are recognising this shift. Procter Gamble uses the phrase “Connect and Develop” to refer to what was previously called R&D, and every year spends about $2bn on this activity. The company has set itself the ambitious goal of sourcing much of its idea input from outside the company. As Nabil Sakkab, former senior vice-president of R&D at the company, commented recently: “The future of R&D is C&D – collaborative networks that are in touch with the 99 per cent of research that we don’t do ourselves. Procter Gamble plans to keep leading innovation and this strategy is crucial to our future growth.” Similar stories can be heard at other companies, including IBM, Cisco and Intel.

Why do I blog this? We have a interesting pattern here. I would like to think about the conclusion we should draw with regard to future R&D workers. That means learning how to network, a bit of PR and a lot of scouting (or either competitive intelligence) to know what’s happening and who meeting to find solutions to one’s (present/latent/future) problems. Carrying out R&D or research or something related with this means both producing knowledge AND giving some insights to others. That’s exactly a feeling I have when I work with companies: they need insights that act as a framework for what they do. They don’t have time and resources to conduct their own research (or at least not on all the issue they have), so they have to go seek it in the wild.