Intel guru: future phones will sense your mood
Karen Nguyen interacts with a display at the Intel booth during the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 8, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus
SAN FRANCISCO |
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Ultra-smartphones that react to your moods and televisions that can tell it's you who's watching are in your future as Intel Corp's top technology guru sets his sights on context-aware computing.
Chief technology officer Justin Rattner stuffed sensors down his socks at the annual Intel Develop Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday to demonstrate how personal devices will one day offer advice that goes way beyond local restaurants and new songs to download.
"How can we change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as assistants or even companions?" he asked.
Handheld devices could combine already common geographic location technology with data from microphones, cameras, heart and body monitors and even brain scans to offer their owners advice that today only a friend or relative could give.
"Imagine a device that uses a variety of sensory modalities to determine what you are doing at an instant, from being asleep in your bed to being out for a run with a friend," Rattner said. "Future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play."
Rattner also demonstrated a television remote control that figures out who is holding it based on how it is held, and then learns the viewer's entertainment preferences.
FALLEN BEHIND
The world leader for decades in microchips for servers and desktop computers, Intel is hurrying to catch up in the lucrative market for smartphones like Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's Blackberry.
Telephones with email, global positioning and media players are pointing the way to a future where ever more functions are packed into ever smaller mobile devices.
The smartphone industry, including technology giants like LG and Samsung, is likely to sell 270 million phones this year and grow 25 percent in 2011, according to market research company IDC.
"I think you can expect to see features that support context-aware computing starting to appear in Intel products in the not-too-distant future," Rattner said.
But analysts say Intel faces an uphill battle getting its microchips into new phones as Nvidia, Marvell and Qualcomm have already made headway with cheap, lower-power processors based on designs by ARM Holdings.
Rattner conceded that questions about privacy and people's willingness to be intimate with their computers will have to be resolved before the future generation of smartphones he described takes off.
"If you think identity threat is a problem today, imagine when your whole context is readily available on the Net," he said.
(Editing by Gary Hill)
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So where are we heading ? I guess some part of your day is devoted to take decision, to make choices, well the big advantage of life assistant devices is that they can help you a lot for these kind of things. You can expect them to know more about yourself than yourself… yep, your whole experience is inside a software thanks to camera and censors and anything you perform helps the software to forsee (with probability) what should happen next. So he can define for you the best choice to make, just ask him or he can even suggest you.
For an example, you working, 12:30pm, time to go lunch ! yeah ! so you stand up and think where to go.. humm… hummm… where are you guys going ?
That was the 2010 version, the new one is…
you working, 12:30 is approaching, you feel hungry and your life assistant knows it already. It also knows that you are sleepy, that’s just logic, he knows that your average sleeping time is 9:20 hours and you got only 6 hours last night. So it is thinking about a quiet restaurant where you can get back some energy. As he also knows about your budget… yes, i forget to mentionit but your life assistant is connected to your bank account and knows all the pricing of the restaurants around… he will suggest you to go to George’s, fair pricing, quiet, 4 minute walk away. Indeed you could have make that choice by yourself but you are so used to rely on your device’s relevant choices that you trust it.
The risk is that you rely too much on it. Then your ability to take decisions by yourself could be impacted especially as we can expect that teenagers will be the first users of these kind of devices so they will get so used to it.
For those who don’t like that future, i would say that all of this is only about formula, shapes, numbers so you can disconnect from it at any time. What is funny is that big corps are trying to put the knowledge in technology and machines and not on the asset which is developping them. Meaning that our dependency index to decisions taken by programs will significantly increase. But don’t worry, the day “R10″ from GM & NASA will be able to clean your toilets and walk your dog is not for 2035, rigth ?
Without joking, the most important part is autonomy, if those programmers are able to programs things in a way that they are autonomous and can learn from the impact of their actions, then we have good reasons to be scared.. but some people will find it cool… as usual ;)
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