Information / data presentation

It is not by accident that I delayed this post after the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005 closure. I knew I could use some information from the publications about it to prove the trends are definitely going towards the expected future. By writing presentation I mean the way we interact with the information. The information / data presentation include visual presentation, audio interface, and every other element that uses our senses to experience the information. Usability is mainly measured by the experience of the presentation layer because no matter how efficient the technology of transportation is, if we cannot notice the start button, we will never be able to play the movie. The presentation is the conceptual representative of the technology and as such, it has the most noticeable effect on the way we experience technology.

The information presentation is a huge area and I will only mention several of the many aspects in this post. Audio and video presentations will be the most significant so lets begin with the audio presentation. The world trend of personal players was very noticeable in CES. This is a comprehensive article of PCWorld’s CES picks and pans. After realizing how HOT the audio market is, I would like to discuss shortly about a very exciting technology. The technology is NXT. The essence of the technology is to produce sound using surfaces and not the standard membranes. NXT claim that: “our engineering and scientific resource has done much to establish it as the new paradigm in sound reproduction”. NXT technology is licensed to mobile phones manufacturers like Siemens, Sharp, NEC, and more. Mobile phones will need no speakers but will use the existing screen to produce the sound. The same approach was taken with personal computers, TV&display and even with cardboard speakers. But in my opinion the most revolutionary product was produced by Ellula and was an inflatable speaker. Unfortunately the company’s future is uncertain and its website is down but you can still see the Hot Air speakers in the gadgets stores. This technology is well adjusted for our mobile future of consuming audio content anywhere easily.

Another product that uses existing surfaces like windows and tables to produce sound is the Sound Bug. The quality of this product is that we can hear it with a group (not like earphones) and it is highly portable (not like most speakers).

Now we switch to the visual department. There are many standards for the next “screens” that are foldable, cheap, lightweight, and mainly very thin. Among the standards in this area are the E-Ink, Universal Display, and more. This field is called E-Paper from obvious reasons. The approach is to provide the ability to have thin, lightweight and foldable screens for various products. Universal display talks not only about mobile products but also about “screen wallpapers”. You can arrange the lighting and pictures on your walls electronically and change the appearance of the room using a single mouse stroke. Think of a situation where you can actually create templates and customized appearances to your living room, bedroom, and practically any other room in the house with this wallpaper. The quality of content is also improved by creating the 3D displays using stereoscopic concepts (2 identical images with an offset create 3D sense) with no need for special glasses. Such a solution is offered by Opticality (formerly known as X3D technologies). Hitachi created a prototype named transpost that creates images that can be viewed from 360 degrees angles. IO2Technology took a fascinating new approach towards image projection. They started with a very big model but now they have very logical sizes for this product. The Heliodisplay takes air from the room, modifies it and projects the images on it. The company checked and found that the change is only temporal and therefore it causes no damage to the air. Look at the images and videos to see how wonderful this solution can be. I thought there is another technology worth mentioning but I really did not know how to encapsulate it, it is what they call a “photon vacuum” which means it takes the image from an existing display (using the maximum of the photon stream) and projects it on a larger surface.

* I would like to mention another exciting feature A9 (Amazon’s search company that was mentioned in previous posts) added to their search engine. It is connected in a way to data presentation but it was something I came across this week and I though was worth mentioning. A9 added visual yellow pages based on a map and images of the businesses. This feature is significant because it gathers many existing technologies to form a new way of experiencing the information. You can see this new feature at: http://a9.com/optical?a=oyp. Another search engines feature released recently is the ability to search for content in TV shows. Google indexes the captions and let you search the desired content in TV shows: http://video.google.com/ and Yahoo lets you search video just like we search for images. It is important to notice that as said in previous posts, we live in a very content rich world and therefore we want a tool to search for everything from anywhere.

Information accessibility

The previous post concluded that there is a huge amount of data and that quality of the data is crucial. To extend the understanding of the smarter search, you can read a very comprehensive article located at: http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/lsa_intro.htm. The internet of things and the ubiquitous manner of networks is the answer for the data gathering and consumption. There is currently an extensive work around the creation of an adequate infrastructure for a connected reality with huge amount of connected elements. When we analyze the different components in the always-connected network we find RFID technology as a basic component. RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is actually not a new technology but there is hype around it and this hype drives this technology forward. EPC (Electronic Product Code) Global (http://www.epcglobalinc.org/) takes the technology of assigning every product an ID to the industry. The goal is to make everything with unique ID that can provide data of type, history, serial number and more. This will serve to optimize the supply chain and allow the ability to track specific items and handle them in every level of the supply chain from assembling to disposal. In the category of identification and applications of short-range wireless there are the NFC (Near Field Communications) and Felica. NFC is a consortium that combines consumer electronics, telecommunications, and credit companies. The first application of the technology was a smart wallet but there are many more applications under development using this technology. Sony which is a member of the NFC consortium created the Felica technology (http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/contents02.html ) to support the need for a contactless technology. NTT DoCoMo uses Felica in a mobile wallet application (http://www.nttdocomo.com/corebiz/imode/services/felica.html). Short-range wireless technologies also include the Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, UWB (Ultra Wide Band) and some other technologies that provide communication means between devices and sensors to create a private network in different speeds and purposes. Alongside these technologies we have the cellular technologies and several other technologies like MobileFi, WiMax, WiBro, and more.
Enough technologies were mentioned and there are many more technologies that provide us the ability to access different kinds of information from different places for different purposes. The complexity of networks and the semantic meaning of networks make networks act not just as a mean to get the information but also as a piece of information. The topography of a network determines its meaning, its capabilities and the different roles of the components in the network. Changing the network is changing components’ meaning. The area of mobility and connectivity is the obvious evolution of the world we live in. If we can access information, why should we be limited to our location? A true convergence of technologies mean we could access any information from any place at any time through whatever network. The concept of software radio demonstrates the true convergence where we use the same antenna and software to access several different networks to retrieve the needed information. All the technical side and the networks selection are done automatically in the device itself and it should be seamless to the consumer. As information consumers we only care how fast we get the information and what is the presentation quality. The handover between the networks, and the detection of the optimized combination of networks should be done without any intervention of the user. Data transport and accessibility will continue to evolve and will keep our consumer behavior of replacing terminals to support the new standards. I will write much more about information accessibility because it has a great impact on the way we experience the technology. A connected environment (not wired anymore) is the next step towards the next paradigm.