Intel Puts Future On Exhibit
Imagine life without house keys or using an entire wall as a touch display. Walk through an exhibit of some of Intel's most intriguing research projects to date.
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Corporate R&D labs exist to pioneer the future. Get inside one and you'll be treated to an extraordinary show and tell. If ever you can get a peek, that is. Most companies consider their research efforts state secrets, and if they showed you, they'd have to kill you, to put a commercial spin on the old spy one-liner.
Not Intel, though. The company turns its labs inside out--and actually makes some of its seminal work public annually at a daylong event called Research@Intel. Even if some of these projects might never come to be, they make for engaging and thought-provoking spectating.
How about turning any wall--or any surface, for that matter--into a display? That's just what you see here as one of Intel's researchers uses touch gestures to move and manipulate photos. Using off-the-shelf hardware components--the secret is in the software--Intel demonstrated a way to also interact with a video and music library and a social media activity stream. It even showed a way to display your personal photos by the mood they convey.
This interactive surface project was among 20 conceptual or prototype technologies and their applications Intel touted at this year's Research@Intel event in San Francisco.
Yes, Intel's efforts are aimed eventually at selling more of its microprocessors. But if this year's Research@Intel was any indication, those chips will be increasingly finding their way into novel uses with far-reaching consequences. Imagine a life without keys, an international business meeting with no language barriers, or never losing your way inside a hospital or office building.
It was striking to witness how far Intel is going to put people and their experiences at the center of its work. After all, the market for chips, as one researcher put it, relies at the end of the day on the humans who will create the demand for them. Intel has studied, for example, how people drive in at least eight different nations. Did you know: Australians keep everything in the car because theft isn't an issue there?
Some subthemes also were on display. Many of these futuristic projects rested on the use of so-called big data--massive, unstructured, real-time amounts of it--generated not just by our online activities but the growing number of devices and sensors populating our lives.
With university researchers, Intel is exploring ways to analyze the oceans of data we're spewing to reveal actual, rather than hypothetical, ways we behave. What happens when there's enough data to dispense with speculation about us and instead certifies our individual and collective behaviors beyond doubt? What would that mean for a company when all the guesswork comes out its business and prediction becomes certainty? The implications are enormous.
That all of life can be quantified, as it increasingly is, presents exciting opportunities--and frightening questions. But for now, leave the heady stuff behind and focus your eyes on the visual feast of the future according to Intel.
Intel researchers turned this fanfold surface into a way to display--and manipulate--photos. The secret is in the algorithms, which make interactions on any surface more accurate and precise. Imagine in this case a digital photo gallery of the family that you, or a guest, could move, enlarge, or change at will. This hearkens to day when digital media can be used in an endless variety of spaces and places.
A team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University collaborated with Intel to use embedded systems in a pioneering new way: to create a robot that can march up and down the aisles of a store scanning every item on the shelves along the way. The robot doesn't just "see" the shelves--it maps them, and precisely. Think of it as Google maps with Street View, only for a store. And the data the robot generates isn't just for helping you find your way to an item. A tireless robot would allow a store to follow its stocks down to the item. Imagine the savings from instantaneously ordering just the right amount of product, or the sales generated by having a fast-moving item always in stock.
The Intel-Carnegie-Mellon team put the scanning robot to use for other purposes, too. Based on the data it collected from the university's bookstore, the researchers created an interactive version of the shop, resembling it in every way. Here, Jon Francis, a doctoral candidate, shows how the immersive system lets customers select and see more about items on the shelf. By the way, this use isn't just a future one. It's present. The virtual store is up and running on the school's Pittsburgh campus.
Using fingerprint and facial recognition as shown here, Intel demonstrated how we might one day be able to dispense with our house keys. The system here doesn't recognize just a single person, either. It can identify each of the people in a group. If two of the people in the group aren't authorized, or the entire group isn't authorized for a certain time of day, too bad. Johnny can't bring his pals into the house to get on the gaming console when he should be doing his homework alone. Is Johnny being a good boy? Then mom can provide access to him and his buddies via her cell phone. Intel also is exploring how other individual traits--someone's gait or a particular mannerism--could be applied to a security system. These recognition technologies could find other uses, too. As part of this exhibit a researcher walked up to a camera and, when it recognized him, the system displayed his calendar on the wall. How could you ever forget a date when it's in your face?
Cars are loaded with microprocessors. Microprocessors process data. They collect it, too. So, what if you take all the data from a car's "activity" stream and put it to use? And what if the car was constantly connected, too? Got a trip scheduled? Your car becomes aware and predicts you need to fill up. A heads-up display just above the dashboard tells you where to get gas at what price. A touchpad on the steering wheel lets you interact with the information systems, which could also extend to social engagements, such as sharing music with friends while they're on the road, too. In this screen, Intel simulates how a network of connected car cameras could record and report traffic conditions in real time.
Did you know those "smart" utility meters on many houses can send data to a utility company every 15 minutes? Your consumption data alone says a lot about you, such as when you're home or not, alone, or with others. Can you trust your utility provider with that knowledge? Or should you control it in your own cloud? That's just one of the issues Intel is exploring as part of an overarching "sustainability" project that records and then manages overall energy consumption, based on data from sensors in your house and your car. Here Intel researcher Eve M. Schooler shows a tablet app depicting a "trusted personal energy cloud."
Did you know those "smart" utility meters on many houses can send data to a utility company every 15 minutes? Your consumption data alone says a lot about you, such as when you're home or not, alone, or with others. Can you trust your utility provider with that knowledge? Or should you control it in your own cloud? That's just one of the issues Intel is exploring as part of an overarching "sustainability" project that records and then manages overall energy consumption, based on data from sensors in your house and your car. Here Intel researcher Eve M. Schooler shows a tablet app depicting a "trusted personal energy cloud."
Corporate R&D labs exist to pioneer the future. Get inside one and you'll be treated to an extraordinary show and tell. If ever you can get a peek, that is. Most companies consider their research efforts state secrets, and if they showed you, they'd have to kill you, to put a commercial spin on the old spy one-liner.
Not Intel, though. The company turns its labs inside out--and actually makes some of its seminal work public annually at a daylong event called Research@Intel. Even if some of these projects might never come to be, they make for engaging and thought-provoking spectating.
How about turning any wall--or any surface, for that matter--into a display? That's just what you see here as one of Intel's researchers uses touch gestures to move and manipulate photos. Using off-the-shelf hardware components--the secret is in the software--Intel demonstrated a way to also interact with a video and music library and a social media activity stream. It even showed a way to display your personal photos by the mood they convey.
This interactive surface project was among 20 conceptual or prototype technologies and their applications Intel touted at this year's Research@Intel event in San Francisco.
Yes, Intel's efforts are aimed eventually at selling more of its microprocessors. But if this year's Research@Intel was any indication, those chips will be increasingly finding their way into novel uses with far-reaching consequences. Imagine a life without keys, an international business meeting with no language barriers, or never losing your way inside a hospital or office building.
It was striking to witness how far Intel is going to put people and their experiences at the center of its work. After all, the market for chips, as one researcher put it, relies at the end of the day on the humans who will create the demand for them. Intel has studied, for example, how people drive in at least eight different nations. Did you know: Australians keep everything in the car because theft isn't an issue there?
Some subthemes also were on display. Many of these futuristic projects rested on the use of so-called big data--massive, unstructured, real-time amounts of it--generated not just by our online activities but the growing number of devices and sensors populating our lives.
With university researchers, Intel is exploring ways to analyze the oceans of data we're spewing to reveal actual, rather than hypothetical, ways we behave. What happens when there's enough data to dispense with speculation about us and instead certifies our individual and collective behaviors beyond doubt? What would that mean for a company when all the guesswork comes out its business and prediction becomes certainty? The implications are enormous.
That all of life can be quantified, as it increasingly is, presents exciting opportunities--and frightening questions. But for now, leave the heady stuff behind and focus your eyes on the visual feast of the future according to Intel.
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