The rise of personal pocket power...

I have long said that we will in future see a world where personal computing devices that we can carry in our pockets change the way we go about doing many of the rudimentary activities (working, playing, shopping etc.) we currently undertake. This is slowly being borne out by the amazing range of apps that smartphone and now tablet users have access to anytime and any place. ComputerWorld has now predicted the historic shift that in the next 18 months, shipments of app-powered smartphone and tablet devices will reach and pass the number of PC shipments. Given the ubiquity of the PC over the last few decades, this is indeed an important shift.

I believe this is just the start. Tablet formats are finally changing the idea of what a computing device has to look like and how it has to be used. The mouse is disappearing. File systems are being conveniently hidden from users. Adding new software apps is becoming a new easy affordable activity rather than the laborious, expensive and technical process it has often been on the PC.

The trend in gaming, started by Wii and now being copied by Playstation's Move and XBox's Kinect, of gesture-controlled computers is also developing fast. As with the iPad, we will see the computer slowly disappear from the user's consciousness as they simply get on with doing stuff! And the development of wearable and environmental computing will take this further in the future.

The emergency catalyst

The Chilean miners plight and rescue is a great example of how an emergency situation, in a smaller but similar way to times of war, can act as a catalyst for technology development, deployment and exploitation. There are many examples of how high technology has been used in the rescue of the Chilean miners, not least the smart belts that each man is wearing during his ascent to the surface, which measures the vital life parameters in the body and transmits that to the medics on the surface.

Innovation is often driven from such emergency situations. In the case of this particular emergency/disaster, it is the deployment and exploitation of technology rather than the development which is most prevalent. However, as with war, it is likely that many of the technologies brought to bear on this context will now be used in other, perhaps less urgent and more day-to-day situations and that is usually a very good thing.

Wearable batteries

One of the ways we will integrate with our computing technology in the future is to wear it, as I have blogged about before. One important component of this is how to power the devices we wear. Scientists have now presented how a coating of carbon nanotube 'ink' on ordinary polyester or cotton fabrics can store electrical energy. The interwoven fibres of such materials are ideal absorbers for for the billionth of a metre across carbon tubes. Once coated, stretching or washing the fabric leaves the electrical characteristics of the material intact. Previously this type of approach has been identified as working on paper, but fabrics open up a whole new world of wearable computing possibilities. Combined with other wearable components such as solar cells means that the wearable batteries could be charged while being worn.

Translation technology...

I have finally gotten around to adding Google's translator widget to this blog, which may help those who read this from some of the 67 countries we have now clocked up. It wasn't so long ago that translation services required the employment of human beings skilled in more than one language and which would take some time to organise and cost a considerable amount.

We will eventually get to a point where perhaps wearable technology allows us to hear one language and understand it simultaneously in our mother tongue. Just as a few years ago i would have found the costs of translating the amount of posts on this blog prohibitive, the economic impact of the simultaneous realtime translator will be very significant. The annual costs associated with translating public material in a multi-cultural country such as the UK, and also of official documents in the European Union are very large. Hopefully machine automated translation will allow this money to be redeployed into more productive core activity such as public services of health, education or aspects of Government.

Wearable displays

While all the talk these days is about touch screen displays, the form factors of future devices will exploit rollable and foldable displays, before the display is separated from the device altogether. The first instantiation of this separation is likely to use special glasses which the user wears and which projects an image onto the lens. I have already seen some excellent prototypes of this sort of display by Konica Minolta in Japan.

Another Japanese innovative company NEC have now given details of what I expect to be the natural successor to the glasses based displays, a prototype retinal display. The 'tele-scouter' has been described as a tiny retinal projection display and microphone mounted on a frame in front of the wearer's eyes. The application they have described it being used for is to translate and display languages. This seems a bit ambitious even for a prototype at this stage but it is good to see these types of innovation beginning to see the light of day. One quote even states that NEC hope to bring something based on this technology into the market during 2010 so watch this space!

Commodity storage

When I was a teen, having one kilobyte of storage in a personal computer was normal! And that same machine lost everything in its now tiny memory when the power was removed, unless you connected an audio cassette recorder and saved the contents on to a magnetic audio tape cassette, (for younger readers, this was one of the pre-cursors to CDs and music downloads!). Now my laptop computer has 320Gb hard disk and 4 Mb RAM, and we take this for granted. That excludes the cache memory the processor chip has on-board or the video RAM included. Optical storage has been through a similar trend ... first the CD, then the DVD and more recently Blu-Ray disks. Scientists are now experimenting with holographic disk technology amongst others. The BBC reported recently on techniques that swell data capacities to 300 times the current DVD standard.

This all points to the fact that storage is no longer a limiting factor in most applications. Storage is becoming a commodity item. In some applications it will be more cost-effective to store huge amounts of data on media and send the media than to send the data over communications links, where immediacy is not so important. Some people are already in the habit of wearing or otherwise carrying a memory stick containing all of their important and needed data with them. The amount of storage in personal devices is ever increasing. Eventually such devices will offer whole-life recording. Storage will play a key part in this as will technologies that enable content to be searched and tagged automatically. I often wish I didn't forget things; in the future I may not be able to!

Printing electronics potential

Innovation in future devices and electronics will be enabled by many advances.  The advent of surface mount components enabled huge advances in miniaturisation of devices for example, which we now take for granted.   Another advance is the ability to 'print' electronic components on to surfaces.   The surfaces may be plastic or textiles for example.  This brings mass market wearable computing closer and is applicable in lots of other contexts such as flexible displays.  

I was pleased to read recently that a new research centre (PTEC) has opened in the UK in County Durham, specialising in printable electronics.  They are hoping to accelerate the commercialisation of printable electronics research and an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) lighting firm is already building their first production line facility within the PTEC clean room environment.  In the display area alone, the printable electronics industry could see massive growth over the next decade as more and more devices demand these new innovative displays.

Nano loudspeakers

There is so much potential in nanotechnology.  Some researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing have found that there are acoustic properties to exploit in sheets of carbon nanotubes such that they could form the basis of a new type of loudspeaker.  Rather than relying on mechanical vibrations through any physical movement of the nanotube sheets, it exploits small temperature changes which occur when alternating electric currents are passed through them.  Thus the pressure changes in the air (producing sound) are caused by thermal oscillations instead.  Because the nanotube sheets can be flexed and formed into different shapes, it may be possible to weave a loudspeaker into clothing for example!  Wearing your loudspeakers will be one way of taking your music with you!  

Wearable computing research

Yesterday I received an invite to the beautiful Sophia Antipolis on the French Riviera for Smart Event 2008, which will focus on wearable computing.  There are a number of research projects running in different parts of the world at the moment in this area.    Specifically, some of these efforts are looking at wearable information technology (IT) in the workplace.  It's clear that there are a whole range of possible application areas for such technology including the personal assistant that never leaves your side, but doesn't disturb you, healthcare monitoring, emergency rescue and personal training.  Many of these wearable computing projects see the technology as a natural extension of the body and human capability.  Many of the benefits of it will only come about not only when the technological solutions are refined more, but also when potential users also share the idea of extension of human capabilities.   

Machines that understand users?

We often hear stories about how users find themselves baffled by machines  ... they don't understand why the computer has done something, or can't work out how something should be configured to achieve the desired outcome.  So users understanding machines is sometimes rather a challenge!   So what about the other way around?

In the future, we will have machines that understand people.  ZDnet reports how Intel has already announced research it is carrying out into sentient machines, which use a whole raft of complex sensors to understand the world of the user and hence awareness of the user's situation.  One Intel project called "everyday sensing and perception" or ESP began during 2007.   Its aim is to achieve 90% accuracy of understanding 90% of an average individual's daily routine.  The sensors involved include very basic measurements as well as higher level interpretations of movement, emotions and words, as well as real time object recognition.  Currently the latter can manage at least 75% accuracy on automatically recognising seven objects, using video capture from a shoulder-worn camera.  The hope is to scale this to hundreds of objects.  This is example of how discretely worn devices in the future will interact with other devices to provide real time inputs - part of a wearable sensor network.

At present, the processing required for this real time event recognition is about 4 TeraFlops and about 10kW of power.  The power consumption aim eventually is less than 1 watt so that portable devices can perform the task.  

And this is only one set of research initiatives in this area.  So in a matter of a decade or two, it may be machines understanding users which is more common a practice than the other way about!

Augmented reality coming true?

The power of the online world will be much more realised when we are able to truly combine it with the real world in real time.  This is often referred to as augmented reality.  We may have to wait a decade before many people are walking around wearing visual devices (active contact lenses or eye glasses with built-in projection) to enable a more immersive augmented reality experience.  

Today I saw this video on YouTube which shows a navigation unit from BlauPunkt ... probably the most reasonable commercial product step towards real time augmented reality I have seen recently.  

Miracle material or danger?

One of the definite big technologies of the future which will revolutionise the world in a whole raft of different applications is nanotechnology.  Within that, carbon nanotubes are probably the most discussed and researched material; indeed I have written several blog entries about these already.  They are indeed a revolutionary miracle material able to be applied in so many ways to overcome limitations of existing materials in today's world.  

In the past, another material was once hailed as a miracle with applications in so many ways, particularly in respect of durability against electrical, chemical and fire damage.  That material was asbestos.  It wasn't understood at the time however that the tiny fibres it consisted of could easily get airborne and once breathed in by humans, would cause devastating suffering including cancers of the lung and mesothelioma for example.  Over 100,000 people died as a result of this and since then the use of asbestos has now been prohibited or very carefully limited in most of the developed world.

Carbon nanotubes share much of the promise that asbestos did way back, but also share some of the dangers.   Already there are applications in paint substances to produce durable coatings for surfaces which are self-cleaning, and they are being woven into fabrics and used to create smart clothing.  The market is estimated to reach $2 billion by 2014.   The nanotubes' needle characteristics also resemble the asbestos fibres and so now research is being carried out to see if people exposed to large amounts of them might be susceptible to similar lung diseases such as cancer.  Let us hope that this revolutionary material does not become the asbestos story all over again.  

Blending virtual and real

The virtual worlds such as Second Life figure in the technology news fairly regularly.   When I do surveys on stage during futures presentations, more and more senior executives in big companies raise their hands when I ask who has an avatar in a virtual space.  For those people who think that virtual worlds are simply play things then think again.  For some they are, but there are also many blue chip corporations actively using and exploiting virtual spaces for business benefit.  

There are interesting debates we can have about where the money is in the virtual world and how the virtual economy operates.  It is also pertinent to consider the motives and decision making of the world's future movers and shakers in a few decades time when they will have grown up never not having had a virtual world presence.  But the potential augmented reality world opportunities are really exciting.  As wearable device technology develops to conveniently present the virtual and real worlds at the same time, then services to exploit this will really come into their own. 

Screens of the future...

Clearly displays for devices are going to develop substantially in the coming years.  While the gesture based touch screens of Apple and Microsoft have had a great deal of publicity in recent times, others are also developing ideas in this space.  The second item (SEN) in this video of Sony concepts shows how they have been exploring elegant ways to include flexible screens on any surface.  The example shown is a screen incorporated into a glass wall.

Along with this we see Konica Minolta prototyping screens built into spectacles.  It is a lightweight wearable display which could be used in applications such as providing instruction manuals to those working on equipment and also movie watching when commuting for example.  I have seen this prototype myself when at the CEATEC Japanese consumer electronics show and was very impressed with the image quality.  I suspect that such developments will spawn new regulations, just as the mobile phone has, in respect of where these devices may be used.  Watching a movie with displays built into spectacles may be acceptable when travelling by train but not when driving a car!   Such new laws may be very difficult to enforce and to prove wrong-doing.  What people do with the new technology may well be more difficult to deal with than the development of the technology itself! 

Power harvesting for future gadgets?

Powering devices and gadgets of the future will be one challenge that offers plenty of opportunity for innovation.  Power harvesting from the kinetic action of people or objects moving, or natural so-called green options such as solar and wind generation offer some contribution.  One innovation I came across today is a combination of solar and power harvesting from the heat of the human body.  IMEC have come up with a system that can generate 1mW indoors and can be fitted to a headphone like wearable device.