Plasma, LCD, and ... ?

As a gadget-guy, I'm often asked about which type of screen people should buy for their new HD widescreen TV.  One of the main decisions to make is the basic type of screen, currently usually plasma or liquid crystal displays (LCD).  The best choice depends on many factors and I don't plan to go through all of them in this blog article. One factor however is power consumption.  Although LCD screens may boast lower consumption, their backlight requirements mean that their power consumption figure is usually fairly constant.  Plasma screens by contrast consume power related to the brightness of the picture being displayed - a picture with lots of dark pixels will consume much less power than the same picture on an LCD.  

Soon there may well be another option to consider.  Mitsubishi have announced plans to launch a range of TVs based on laser displays in the third quarter of 2008.  They state that such technology will bring a new level of performance to high definition displays due to its ability to display twice as many colours as the best LCD can manage at a frequency of 120Hz.   Laser screens will be available in large sizes as with current plasmas, and importantly will consume less power than both plasma and LCDs. 

The disruptive wave of change

We know that the only inevitable thing about change is that it will continue, and that technological change is speeding up and continues to do so.  People are affected by this change in different ways and to different degrees.  It is often harder for those who have grown up with something constant to find in later life that it isn't true anymore.  So it is assumed (sometimes incorrectly) that older people find change (and technological change in particular) more difficult to cope with.  Often it is actually only that characteristics of the new technology dont lend themselves to the failing senses (e.g. seeing small screens on mobile phones in poor light when one's eyesight is deteriorating).  

In fact it is often most difficult for those that have been on the bow of the wave of change to come to terms with either that or subsequent similar changes that follow, perhaps through distrust.  And it doesn't just apply to technology.  Those who were most disrupted by decimalisation of the UK currency in the seventies, people of my parent's age, found that more difficult than my own experience of it.  For my parents it affected everything they bought and paid for.  For me it affected my pocket money!  And for many of those people like my parents who had direct experience of the change, it has coloured their view of any future currency changes (such as the Euro). 

So as we go forward with new technology, there will always be a wave of those who are hit somehow by it in a way that makes them wary of following disruptions.  But for the masses, who came before them or after them, embracing the change will bring great opportunities. 

Car futures

So the world oil price continues to rise ... the cost of petrol (gas for my transatlantic readers!) continues to rise and governments like the UK continue to tax these substances heavily.  They also plan to tax the purchase of cars that consume the most fuel and give the highest emissions.  Of course the green lobby think this is pressure on people to use cars is insufficient and wonder why people don't simply want to give up their car for public transport.  Well its quite simple really.  People generally like their cars!  

Car owners tend to look after their cars.  They personalise them, customise them and enjoy the individual freedom that transport dedicated to them gives them.  They like the door to door and anytime of any day nature of the car.  And many of the nicest cars on the road are not actually owned by individuals at all; rather by leasing companies who provide the car on behalf of employers as a part of their reward package.  So why is it that some people imagine that these car users want to leave their cars (which are inherently also a symbol of their success) on the driveway at home to get on a bus?  This assumes that a bus is actually available as an alternative.

Of course technology is gradually meaning that manufacturers can offer lower consumption cars; my favourite hybrids are from Lexus but they are of course many others.  Honda have just announced details of experiments they have done with a hydrogen powered car, for example. And elements of the green lobby will still rant on about the whole lifecycle cost of such cars to the environment, but fail to see that changing the automotive industry to newer greener mechanisms than the combustion engine is like turning a super-tanker.  It will happen through small steps and gradually.  And people will gradually get used to these new-fangled types of car and begin buying them in large numbers (as with Toyota's Prius).  

But eventually, the answer is not to take people out of their cars which they love, but to make the car and road systems more efficient.  Journey times could be faster, congestion and accident rates much lower (if not extremely rare at all) on major trunk routes by allowing technology to control the cars.  The inter-car gaps could be smaller and more traffic carried.  People will be unable to manually join a motorway or freeway; only the computerised automated systems within vehicles will be able to manage this.  

The answer in the longer term I believe is to apply technology to give people what they want but in a greener, more environmentally and safe way, rather than tax and charge them to change the social behaviour of what others would like them to want.  So I hope this latter approach is just one of the stepping stones while we await the technological change that is necessary.

Positioning aside from GPS

The question of where a device and so perhaps where the person who owns or uses it is, is going to be more crucial in the future as we get used to and rely on location-based or location-related services.  The natural assumption many people make is the use of GPS systems - and this is unsurprising, given the recent explosion of consumer electronics devices such as TomTom navigation gadgets etc.  But GPS is imperfect and unsuitable in many applications and a number of other technologies are also going to be increasingly important in terms of assisting with 'the positioning problem'. 

Devices such as accelerometers, electronic gyros and digital compasses can also be very important in piecing together the positioning puzzle.  The cost of these small components is relatively small and so they are increasingly being incorporated into consumer electronics gadgets of various sorts.  A digital camera with a picture stabilising feature will use a gyro component for example.  Performing some number crunching on acceleration data can derive velocity of course.  Combined with mapping information and an initial starting point, tracking movement quite accurately is possible, particularly within buildings and underground (for which maps and floorplans are usually readily available).  

In the future, it will be the combination and aggregation of various positioning data, together with the analysis of such data, which will open up many more applications for location-related services.  

3D or not 3D? That is the question...

A great deal of research has gone on over many decades about producing three dimensional computer generated images.  Some were pretty impractical, involving the user having to wear coloured glasses to look through.  Other more recent 3D televisions I have seen have really been quite impressive, if you sit or stand in exactly the right place relative to the screen.  And of course the problem with TV in 3D is the production of material filmed in 3D (e.g. with multiple cameras).  Broadcasters are currently occupied with creating content in high definition (HD) and that is only available in the UK sluggishly, as the number of HD televisions increases in homes. 

But 3D in other applications apart from TV may have a faster time to market.  Indian tech giant Infosys has recently announced the development of portable holographic machines and reckons that 2010 will see a significant number of devices that can beam 3D images into our lives.  Imagine a mobile phone of the future that not only allows your mother-in-law to video call you, but also beams her to you in full 3D!   Scary huh? 

Other more interesting applications would include medicine, accident scene reporting and education.  The combination of such 3D projection with virtual worlds and avatars could provide a much more realistic and immersive environment which expands the exploitation of virtual spaces.  The advantage of holographic approaches is that it can enable 3D imaging with no loss of resolution, unlike stereoscopic methods.  I guess some folk won't mind losing some resolution with the 3D mother-in-law though!  

It's the Software, stupid!

When the iPod hit the streets, it wasn't the first music player, but it was rather more attractively designed than most others - it was a piece of consumer electronics that was desirable and sexy.  Many people concentrated on the hardware, the hard disk inside, the click wheel on the front and the aesthetic design.   Certainly the latter is important, but so is the invisible software within the device.  This is something that Apple's competitors often seem to miss the point about.  The same is true of their computers, which while also nicer to look at than the traditional beige plastic box of the PC, are actually distinguished by their software - the Mac OS which makes for their legendary ease of use.  

And the same is now true of Apple's adventure into the phone market.  Most of the other established manufacturers have now copied the hardware in some form or other, with touch screens, designs without many buttons, slimmer designs, accelerometer sensors inside, and more.  But none of these apparent clones can really copy iPhone easily.  This is because the software is what defines the device and its usability.  In addition with iPhone, Apple have added to the software advantage by providing the same tools that they use to write iPhone applications to other application developers and also provided an eco-system to market, distribute, install and update these apps to people. 

So next time you see a potential clone of an Apple product, just think ... 'it's the software, stupid!'.

Real benefits for more people?

My best transatlantic friend pointed out this article from ABC news to me today.  It is about the negative effects of widespread GPS technology on humans as they get out of the habit of finding their own way.  In the future, very many more people will have easy access to not only GPS but also many other technologies which will render some existing human skills and activities redundant.  While some hail the iPhone at the moment, in the future there will be far more capable devices in many more people's pockets, providing exactly what information they need, wherever they need it, and whenever they need it.   Humans will need to do less of some things they previously did.  

The phenomenon described in the ABC article about GPS is not limited to people having no sense of direction in future.  It already began with the advent of much simpler technology.  How many people have got out of the habit of remembering phone numbers since phones began storing them for us?   Another example is the inability of some people to follow recipes and cook fresh food - they live entirely on pre-prepared meals that simply pass from freezer to microwave oven.   This trend has again been enabled by technology which is now in the form of fairly ubiquitous white goods.  

So what next?  What other activities will go out of fashion?  What other skills will be lost?   Which social customs will die out?   And is it all negative?   Actually there are other new skills that many people will learn to do with the new technologies, a number of which will be taken for granted until they too die out through the advent of newer developments.  For example, most people now are familiar with the use of a computer mouse to control applications on a personal computer.  This invented human skill will have a limited life once technology allows people to interact more naturally with machines.   And so the cycle will continue...  although I hope that technology never causes humans to forget how to value the friendship of others.   Otherwise I may never have seen the ABC article and never have written this entry!