warned01 April 2008, 5:38 PM
IDF Shanghai | Tomorrow's mobile phones will watch your every move, Intel says, outlining its new mobile tech plans.
The chip giant says the phones of tomorrow will read human gestures, your location and other factors and adjust their interfaces based on where they are.
In pre-briefings before Intel Developer Forum Shanghai, which starts tomorrow, Intel said one of its big new pushes was to make mobile devices connect seamlessly with the “sea of other devices” they constantly move through, and read human gestures and behaviour.
“We don’t see that the future of the world is defined by people being able to type enormously quickly with their thumbs,” joked Intel’s Kevin Kahn.
There are three key technology groups that mobile devices needed to include that they don’t today, according to Intel: high computing power, all sorts of sensors like compasses, GPS, accelerometers and so on, and more advanced wireless communication with other devices.
Head of Intel Research, Andrew Chien, said the world was at “a new explosion point”, where mobiles would start to revolve around “sensors and inference”.
Intel has wrapped all this up in a strategy called “Everyday Sensing and Perception” (with the convenient acronym ESP – groan!). This covers Intel’s research into how a mobile device will sense how many people are in a room; what is the topic of conversation; is it a business discussion or pleasure, and so on.
One practical example Intel offered was a user sitting down on a plane and reading their email on a Blackberry screen. “Why is it when you’re on a plane you have a monitor on the seatback in front of you, you still read your email on your tiny Blackberry screen?“ Intel’s Kevin Kahn asked. He said mobile phones should be able to sense when they are near a TV or projector and offer to project photos or documents to the screen.
Another example was a user pointing a phone camera at a building. The phone should be able to sense its location by GPS, as well as the direction it is pointing using a compass, do image recognition on the building’s facade, and then provide information about what the building is, its phone number, the company’s web services, add it to your address book, and so on.
But Intel admits there are many challenges in achieving its vision. For example, it will need to deliver dramatic improvements in accuracy. “The devices [with sensors] had better be right pretty much all the time or they are going to be way more irritating than the devices we have today.” (Think Clippy.)
Kahn admitted the opportunities were tremendous but the practicalities were hard. Large collection of different sensors, constantly being sampled, will chew up significant amounts of power. “A couple of watts would be chewed up constantly, which would mean battery life of less than an hour or two,” Kahn said.
The second major challenge is that data coming from a sensor is noisy and has a lot of irrelevant information, which requires significant computing power to clean up and make sense of. For example, gesture recognition captures backgrounds too which have to be stripped out. Intel’s tests on effective video event recognition needed 4 teraflops of continual CPU power, chewing 10kW of power. To get it on to a phone, that would have to be brought down by a factor of 10,000 so it could work in less than 1W of power for mobile devices
And finally, constant wireless communication chews power – especially when multiple types of radio are in use. However Intel says the shift to 32nm manufacturing processes for radio chips will dramatically cut power consumption here. Intel also previewed a new 802.11n/WiMax combined chip which is three times more power efficient than any previous equivalent. It jumps between frequencies to avoid interference, which also allows it to turn its radio power down.
Intel’s mobile devices of tomorrow
Intel offered the following vision for devices of tomorrow vs today:
- Today, we have local applications running on mobiles. Tomorrow it will be web applications taking advantage of massive computing power in data centres, with the results being displayed on your mobile.
- Touch interfaces will be augmented with gesture and voice driven interfaces.
- Currently, the connectivity of mobile phones is largely dictated by available space for connectors in their form factor. Tomorrow, devices will be able to connect securely and wirelessly to devices nearby without complex setup.
- Most mobile devices have a limited view of the internet, whereas Intel predicts that tomorrow’s devices will revolve around an uncompromised internet experience.
Some phones have GPS today for location awareness, but do very little with the information other than plotting their spot onto a map. Tomorrow’s phones will have “location relevance” – their user interface will adjust depending on where a user is: at home, at work, on the road, and so on.
Dan Warne travelled to IDF Shanghai as a guest of Intel