Jon Peddie Editorials

The data’s there, why not use it?

2010-08-17T23:11:28Z

Every day we (or at least I) read about an augmented reality (AR) application or installation somewhere in the world. Maybe I’m just sensitive to the topic since it fulfills one of my fantasies about a sci-fi singularity world I can’t wait to enjoy.

The idea of location-based information flowing to me based on a preferences algorithmic learning program (like the Pandora digital radio application) powered by gigantic cloud-based processors and delivered to my very smartphone (which knows who I am, and where I am) is so appealing I simply can’t wait.

Why should I wait? Do I really have to? In our new Audi we can tell the nav system to show gas stations, ATMs, clothing stores, or parking lots, and more. The data is there in the cloud. We all helped put it there either by voting with our presence and Euros/Yen/Dollars, or by unconscious selection with click-throughs. You can even have an app that will locate your phone—that’s the ultimate irony—find the finder. (And yes there have been stalking cases where that app has been misused.)

You can find shops for food, banks, pubs, and bicycle shops in the London underground, or pretzel stands and bookshops in the New York subway, or other trains in Tokyo’s underground. You can buy that data, and a lot of it is free—those merchants and underground train operators want you to know where they are. So the data is there, and a few enterprising folks in various countries are wedding it to the camera in your pretty-smart phone.

You’ve seen the demo—you turn on the camera, point it at something—a street, the ground, a building and overlays about the stuff in the area float in the image.

(If you haven’t seen them, go here: http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/augmented-reality-apps/—and look at Layar and others.)

With an app like Nearyou you can point at things to get data about them, or find places, and then you can lay your phone flat in your hand (parallel to the ground) and see a 2D map with directions to whatever you’re looking for. So Zagat will find restaurants for you and allow you to make reservations—and you can do it with voice recognition—how’s that for the ultimate smart companion?

And you can play games like AR Labyrinth which creates a 3D maze on your phone that you wander through (you have to be in a large open area like a field, wouldn’t want you walking into people, walls or buses.)

So we’re getting really close. Right now the AR apps are all visual. Yet we walk around most of the time with ear buds in, especially in crowded transportation systems like airports and undergrounds. What about audio AR? In addition to the alerting aspects of merchandising, think of the aid it would provide for people with sight impairment, or age disorders (including forgetting where the car is parked) How about a simple alert (because after all we wouldn’t want Lady Gaga interrupted) that said, “Better check the map—NOW! Prada alert.”

And if the getting smarter phone can be tied into the semi-smart car’s audio system for phone calls, why couldn’t it cooperate with the car’s GPS and database, and use its visual system too?

And how about AR-virtual video conferences? I’m in my pajamas, need a shave and my hair hasn’t felt a comb or brush in 24 hours and you want to have a video conference? I don’t think so. But just a minute, let me send my virtual avatar to you. VenueGen has a system that tries to do this. It’s too bandwidth dependent right now but shows promise.

I’m super excited about the LTE bandwidth coming, combined with the gazillions of MIPS available in the cloud, our linkage to virtual worlds that are presented in AR on our super-smart phones is clearly how we get to the singularity. Can we make this train go faster please?

Leading edge, bleeding edge, or just edgy?

2010-08-06T18:35:43Z

Siggraph is enigmatic, sphinx like, all knowing, all seeing, and unknowable. Is it a trade show, an academic conference, a big R&D lab, a screening room, a job fair, an artist’s colony, or a gathering of the clan?

Yes, Siggraph is. As such, it’s probably a little disappointing to some that it’s not more of whichever aspect they want. It’s literally a shared experience, a happening, chaotic, spontaneous, shocking, surprising, sometimes loud, and annoying. It’s a mix of spiked neon hair, grey hair, no hair, and long shiny hair, but regardless of the costume and artifacts, no one who attends Siggraph is dumb, slow, or inarticulate. It’s the smartest group of people you can rub up against and randomly engage in an interesting conversation. Not at all like CES, NAB, or even E3. Siggraph is a gathering of scientists, really smart programmers, creatives, and big shots—and amazingly they all get along together and seem to seek out each other’s company.

At one company presentation we were told that there is no more magic in graphics, and that the last ten years have been a decade of maturity. No magic … Perhaps a poor choice of words, and no doubt the speaker meant that there don’t seem to be any major inflection points like texture or bump mapping on the horizon, and all we’re doing now is refining the known processes.

Not by a long shot. Yes, there will continue to be improvements in the techniques of today, but the never ending increase in processing power, lower costs, higher and faster storage capacities, and enhanced displays will fuel the imagination of the next generation of developers who will amaze and delight us, and sadly maybe leave us behind because we can’t quite figure out what they’ve done. This is the Singularity—its coming whether you like it (or its name) or not.

Algorithmics, systematics, and semicans

I’ve been thinking about some of the generations and given them names (an idea I got from Bubba Lombardi at THQ), and we’ve had three generations of developers: Algorithmics, Systematics, and Semicans.

From the seventies to the early nineties we had the Alogrithmics. The Blinns, Catmulls, and Whitteds to name a few of the founding fathers.

Then we had the systematics—the SGIs, E&Ss, and HPs. They gave us our first machines to work on that didn’t require a government agency to buy.

At the turn of the century we saw the emergence of the semicans, the Nvidias, ATIs, Intels, and a bunch of now gone innovators and explorers. These are the folks who think the Semi CAN, and will, change our lives—and they’re right.

The Semicans will give us the engines at ridiculously affordable prices which in turn will allow the Systematics to build boxes and displays that a new generation of Algorithmics will use to give us procedural AI simple UI tools for things like facial simulation and/or recognition, robotic control in a virtual rig or a hardwired machine, and natural language realtime translation conversations with peers and machine.

I used to think the future could be seen through the eyes of the Emerging Technologies curator or jury. This year they had 130 submissions and selected 26 of them, and you could have spent a day looking at and trying to understand them all. And there was no discernable (by me) theme—except that there was no theme. So new technologies, new explorations and developments, as exemplified by the Emerging Technologies demos, are chaotic, and borderline anarchic—as they should be. And, due to competitive and paranoiac attitudes of some companies, possibly even niftier stuff is labs at those organizations.

Leading edge or edgy?

So Siggraph is a peek at the future, though a fly’s eye—looking in 20 different directions at once. Matured, asymptotic in development, flat-lined—I don’t think so. You better put your seat belt on, we about to have the ride of our lives.

The art of testing and other esoteric sidelines

2010-07-22T17:49:54Z

We test a lot of things here at JPR and at JPA before that. We’ve been testing stuff officially and unofficially for 30 some years—you’d think we’d know what we’re doing. Hell, we thought we knew what we were doing.

This last batch of graphics AIBs really threw us. We couldn’t get things to work. Benchmarks wouldn’t bench. Command lines needed to set parameters wouldn’t work. Resolutions would stay stuck, and over-clocking tools defied us to make them behave—and all the while the clock is ticking ….

No one wants to read about a test done on a product that was released weeks ago—no matter how good your insight or analysis is. However, at the same time, we won’t just parrot the reviewer’s guide given out with most new products. No one wants to read that either, although sadly there’s a lot of it on the web.

So we try to make our own test scenarios and find new and interesting stuff—sometimes we succeed. And, we also want to know how these work, what they can and can’t do. We’re a curious lot here—that’s probably one of the things that keeps us running.

But this week we were defeated—almost. We couldn’t make a spreadsheet work to save our lives (we’re on rev 10 now if you can believe that). And so, we didn’t get the analysis done till Friday instead of Wednesday as we hoped. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve got three people working all day on it the pressure builds up.

So what did we learn? Aside from the fact that time pressure makes good people make bad mistakes? Well we learned (in this particular case) that Nvidia has a pretty damn good board in the GTX460. We almost never look at other reviews until we’ve done ours. Afterwards when we did we found that several web sites agreed with us, only they all said it before us—sigh.

There’s a lot at stake here for AMD and Nvidia in the case of graphics AIBs. The web sites cater mostly to the game enthusiasts. We are read by investors, OEMs, and maybe a few gamers. It used to be thought that a gamer had an influence span of 10 to 15, maybe as high as 20 in mid 2000s. But the market has grown and the gamers aren’t as important as they used to be in influencing opinion. So raw performance isn’t the only criteria anymore. Price of course, and power consumption, and video-photo editing capabilities are equally important in all but the enthusiast segment.

The other thing we have to deal with right (and so does every other AIB evaluator) is the lack of an industry standard. Years ago Nvidia had a mediocre part and it didn’t do well on the industry benchmark 3DMark. So Nvidia, trying to divert attention away from that, went on a crusade to get reviewers to use games rather than synthetic tests. Nvidia was quite successful in that effort and now if you visit any reviewer site you’ll see lots of different games are used for evaluating an AIB. Real world tests are of course a better indication if the reader happens to have or be interested in the games being used for the testing.

But OEMs, and especially those white box OEMs in the east, rely on a standard test and test number for their evaluations and pricing comparisons. Either you run Vantage well or forgetaboutit. But Vantage stops at DirectX 10, and FutureMark won’t have a DirectX 11 benchmark out till September at the earliest. In their absence we, and others, have been using the Unigine engine benchmarks (first was “Sanctuary,” then “Tropics,” and now the current one is called “Heaven.”) These are good, and attractive tests, but they are beyond the demands most games make on the graphics board. You could argue that if you do well in Heaven today you’ll be just fine in the next generation of DirectX 11 games.

So what we did was to take a few DX11 games and Heaven and average their scores at various resolutions to arrive at a generalized figure of merit for the performance quality and capability of a graphics AIB—we in effect made a synthesized test.

A gamer isn’t going to buy an AIB for $200 because it does really well on one game. He or she will want to feel confident that the AIB will perform well in general in not only today’s games but tomorrow’s as well. And that’s what a generic synthesized test will provide, or so we hope. The longevity of a graphics board design is what a good reviewer is expected to expose and highlight. It’s what we try to do. But boy is it hard, thankless work.

Been seeing double for a very long time

2010-07-08T16:19:29Z

The idea of using a computer for stereovision representation of molecules dates back to Project MAC at MIT in 1966. And in the early 1980s the concept became known “molecular graphics” and the Molecular Graphics Society (MGS) in the UK formalized the notion and science of computer-based molecular modeling. Initially much of the technology concentrated either on high-performance 3D graphics, including interactive rotation or 3D rendering of atoms as spheres (sometimes with radiosity). The first stereovision machine I saw was an Evans & Sutherland (E&S) workstation in the early eighties. It had a vector (“stroke”) display. The stereo device or selection device was a spinning mechanical shutter that was manually synced with a potentiometer that looked like a beer can on the side of the display.

StereoGraphics, founded in 1980, introduced the first commercially successful LCD shutter glasses around 1985 and they were used for molecular modeling and for some of the large multi-screen visualization systems designed by E&S and SGI.

In 1995 StereoGraphics founder Lenny Lipton invited me to his lab in San Rafael, CA. He gave me a large pair of glasses with dangling wires and showed me an F-22 on a 19-inch Sony Trinitron—it was amazing. Other companies followed, including Kasan, Miro, Nuvision, and VRex. Meanwhile, NovoLogics had developed three S3D games for PCs. S3D gaming had arrived.

At $179 StereoGraphics’ SimulEyes system, which consisted of a controller (synchronizer) box and a set of tethered glasses was the market leader. The glasses weighed less than two ounces, and up to four glasses could be plugged into a single SimulEyes VR control box—add-on glasses were available for $99. The price bar was set 15 years ago.

In 1999 Nvidia got into the game by offering special backward compatible drivers for games, and partnered with Elsa, which offered the popular 3D Revelator—one of, if not the, first IR controller glasses—that was 11 years ago.

By 2001, with the popping of the Internet bubble and associated depressions, S3D was a forgotten novelty; most of the companies associated with S3D were gone by 2002. Nvidia went on to other things, and StereoGraphics stuck to its knitting and kept supplying the scientific market with great S3D glasses. S3D has remained, but as a specialized technology for niche markets. For instance, Lipton developed RF glasses for Caves and large visualization rooms.

Other schemes were developed for S3D including the circular-polarized glasses RealD introduced to the cinema market in 2004. And, in 2006 RealD acquired StereoGraphics, and briefly, Lenny Lipton.

But S3D for PCs has remained a novelty until Nvidia introduced its 3D Vision in 2009. Just Prior to Nvidia entering the market, IZ3D introduced a co-axial dual-screen monitor that used polarized glasses. It was rather dim and the stereo effect was not too impressive.

So back to the future, ten years later, proving once again Kathleen Maher’s Practicality Gap theorem, Nvidia enters the market with shutter glasses. And the proof of Maher’s theorem was the introduction of 120Hz screens—the industry had wait for that.

When CRTs were used for S3D the refresh rate could be gotten up to 90 Hz and sometimes to 100Hz, close enough almost for a flicker-free S3D presentation but when the industry moved to LCD monitors we were locked into 60Hz refresh, which would only yield an unacceptable 30Hz S3D display.

LCD panel builders didn’t have S3D in mind when they developed 120 and 240Hz displays. They were trying to eliminate the smear a 60Hz display displayed in fast action sports. Samsung and ViewSonic thought 120Hz might be a differentiator for them in the PC display market, and in 2009 they introduced the displays.

Producing an S3D image is twice the work of a 2D display. You need 2X the display memory, 2X the bandwidth, and 2X the computation. A good graphics AIB can (just) handle that for a single screen. The multi-screens systems I am so fond of are quite a bit more work. For now, two AIBs are needed.

The three-screen system we are testing (see Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs this issue) takes us back to the future of high-end visualization pioneered by E&S and SGI but it’s cheap in comparison. What we have in the lab right now is 5760 pixel wide stereo visualization system. Ten years ago a comparable system would cost over $100,000—ours can be had for $4,000 or less. Now, combine this $4,000 visualization system with a sub-$10k super computer. Now you’ve got a lab, a two-machine system as powerful as behemoths that used to sell for $1 million or more. It’s under your desk, and you don’t have to share it with anyone.

That, is freakin amazing! And I think will revolutionize the visualization industry.

It’s the noun stupid - Video Game Consoles

2010-06-23T18:10:37Z

I couldn’t understand after all these years why the press keeps referring to, and getting excited about “video games,” and yet never mentioned the PC.

The first console dates back to the “Brown Box,” Ralph Baer developed at Sanders in 1962 (although Baer says he thought of it in 1952.) Sanders licensed it to Magnavox in 1969, and Magnavox then released it in 1972 as the Odyssey.

However, the first computer game, “Spacewar,” was developed on a PDP-1 in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen at MIT.

Actually, using a computer to play a “game” dates back to 1946 when a missile game was designed for playing on a CRT by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. But those examples were laboratory games, not products, and the Odyssey was a commercial product (and sold about 100,000 in the first year.)

Well DUH…. “Video games,” to the press means consoles and maybe handheld devices like DS and PSP. “Video” coming from the video of the TV—TV-Video, it’s all the same thing isn’t it? They don’t call them graphics games, or PC games, do they?

You see “PC games” are just another app that runs on PCs, but console games, well, they’re video games – don’t you see the difference? Big companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Activision, EA, Ubisoft and others are in the video games market and as NPD tells us, it’s big, really BIG—in the U.S. which is the market NPD measures. Video Games is an index, something to watch. PC games, on the other hand are just one more application out of many.

And, just in case you’ve not been keeping score, these $300 ASP console devices with TV resolution have, since 2005, sold almost 270 million units. Well yes, PCs sell 300 million every year, and yes the ASP is close to $1,000 and yes they have higher resolution monitors—but—they are not single function dedicated devices like a console—why shucks, it’s like comparing a dedicated $200 e-reader to a $700 iPad.

According to Strategy Analytics, the video game market worldwide has grown by over 50% in the period 2005-2010 and is estimated to be worth $47.5 billion in 2010. We think the PC hardware—just hardware—gaming market will be worth $29 billion next year.

So now, after all these years, I finally get it—video games = consoles. I can put my sword away and give those windmills a reprieve. No longer do I have to carry on the crusade to get the PC a little respect. If you’re interested in computer games you’ll have to look elsewhere for data. NPD and GFX may have some PC game sales data, but they don’t like to talk about it. Increasingly, these titles are not sold in the stores. And how would you measure all the game downloads from Steam and other sources—not everyone goes to Walmart to buy a game you know (and even if they did, NPD doesn’t collect cash register data from Walmart.)

E3, the Electronics Entertainment Expo, is primarily a console game conference. Probably, the show organizers should just admit that and clearly market the show as a console show. Every once in a while over the years the PC folks would go to E3, but this year only Alienware and Intel were on the show floor and Nvidia had a meeting room.

Game developers, including Activision, EA, and Ubisoft say they don’t like the PC because of software piracy. This is a specious claim given that one of their major issues is stopping Console game piracy. And with download sites like Steam is it really an issue? I think it’s more a matter of the PC moving too fast for them. As a result they design for a console and then re-port to the PC resulting in 50% of the PC’s power going to waste.

So maybe we need an E4—Extreme Electronics Engagement Experience conference and this show will be devoted to games designed for the most advanced graphics platforms out there. And maybe that’s what all this is really about. Maybe, what’s really got me all riled up is that I’m afraid people will stop developing games that take advantage of the great graphics hardware that’s available on the PC. And when that days comes, I’m going back to the beer distribution business in Newark.

Those ungrateful consumers

2010-06-11T13:13:35Z

Look at all we’ve done for them and have they once said thanks? No, all they want to do is talk about the good old days. The good old what? You mean when we had Windows 95, and a laptop had VGA resolution in a nine-inch screen, weighed ten pounds and ran on a battery for almost three hours? Yeah, that was great wasn’t it?

Today we hardly even mention the battery life of a laptop. Kathleen Maher has a Vaio that refuses to quit, in fact she runs out of energy before it does. She also has an iPad and it holds up pretty well during the day. Both those devices weigh a little more than a couple of hard boiled eggs, and have 800 line resolution displays. But did she ever once say thanks? No, but she has marveled about it more than once.

We also have ebooks, Kindles and Sony, and they too weigh nothing, have beautiful displays and run for days without being recharged.

But we’ve never, not once sent an email or letter to any of those companies or their chip suppliers and said, “Gee guys, thanks.”

Pretty soon we’ll not only have seemingly infinite battery life, machines that are 14mm thick, weigh less than a paper bag, and have gorgeous high-resolution color displays with touch, but we’ll be able to display any content imaginable on them from old masterpieces scanned and made available for free by Google (excuse me, THANK YOU GOOGLE), live TV in any part of the world we happen to be, stereovision display when we want it as well as stereovision video capture with a single lens/sensor, streaming video from the web, movies on a SD card, and every song we every heard or hoped to hear. We might even have all that in a tube that we unroll when we want some content.

All that stuff exists today, now. Much of it is in one machine or another and the rest should be with us by the end of the year or first quarter next at the latest. The only thing that is a little delayed, but surely coming is the rolled up version.

And has anyone said thanks yet? I can’t hear you ….

But we don’t need to say thanks. If the technology is doing its job, and delivering on its promise, then we are totally unaware of it—the technology works when it disappears (Peddie’s third law).

Just as you never think about the pistons or valves in your car doing their job, quietly, energy efficiently, and for hundreds of thousands of miles and many years, you shouldn’t have to be aware of electronic technology. TV sets hit that level of performance and we stopped thinking about them, took them for granted. Now like everything else our TVs are going to be smart. Our houses are someday going to be smart and we’ll live like we’re on the Enterprise walking around telling things to turn on or off or fetch some content.

And that TV, well it too will disappear. All our walls and/or windows will be active surfaces and be a TV screen or a picture or a sun shade, maybe even a solar collector. Remember that roll up model mentioned above? Well what if it isn’t rolled up but an OLED wall? And solar cells are now being made transparent (see Marker Faire article this issue.) So all our windows in our smart house now power the house and all those smart devices that have disappeared we never said thanks for. It changes the notion of interior decoration dramatically.

This is one of the ways the singularity will be part of our life. Not threatening robots with acne and a bad attitude, but invisible life enriching features that will use less power (or generate it) and be at our beck and call. And when you walk in the door of this smart home and say “lights, news, call mom.” How about saying, “Oh, and thanks.”

The Tyranny of Terminology

2010-05-28T12:28:20Z

One of the running jokes about the difference between the English, French and German languages are how rich and efficient English is and how complicated and wordy French and German can be.

We struggle with terminology here all the time, trying to come up with meaningful, efficient, and entertaining nomenclature to describe the incredibly complex thingies we deal with every day.

We are currently struggling with two developmental products that as of yet have not been totally defined or turned into a comfortable acronym. Our attempts this week concerned the new class of processors, which have graphics embedded in them, and the new class of PCs that will deliver stereovision.

HPU. The new processors from AMD (Fusion—Llano and Ontario) and Intel (Clarksdale, Arrondale, and Sandy Bridge) have multicore x86 processors, and multicore SIMD GPUs. In one sense they are neither fish nor fowl, and in another sense they are the ultimate manifestation of Moore’s law and massive integration. They are the epitome of the long promised heterogeneous processor, and as such we are designating them the HPU—Heterogeneous Processor Unit. We experimented with various forms of integrated graphics processor (IGP), integrated processor graphics (IPG), and processor integrated graphics (PIG). None of these terms or their subsequent acronym was commutative or satisfying, and seemed to cause considerable confusion because of the similarity to the established chipset IGP acronym—something new was needed and we think HPU satisfies that need. AMD prefers the term APU (Accelerated Processor Unit), and Intel thinks no term is needed other than i5 or i7.

We’ll try HPU and let the consumers, press, and financial analysts tell us if we got it right.

Everyone is in a hurry and looking for shortcuts. Shortcuts in their work process, shortcuts in their commute to and from home, and shortcuts to marketing a product. One of the tools we all try to use are abbreviations. The medical industry is often criticized and made the brunt of jokes about their lexicon of strange coded words. The computer industry is no different. I once sat in a meeting at Intel and listened to Intel people speak to each other almost entirely in acronyms. I even commented at one point, do you realize your sentence didn’t have a single word in it? However, that was a very efficient exchange between the Intel people. And although I didn’t have the secret decoder ring to be able to follow what they were saying, my understanding was not critical to the meeting or the information transfer. So we do speak to each other in secret languages, and they are not designed to exclude people or talk behind their backs, but rather to get the maximum amount of information exchanged as quickly as possible—they were in a hurry.

The naming of acronyms, perhaps taken to new levels of absurdity by the military and various government agencies, is critical to their acceptance and often understanding. Sometimes, a brand gets established (like CUDA) and then later as it gains acceptance an acronym is developed for it. An acronym not only has to be an abbreviation of the terms it’s describing, but it has to sound cool, and be memorable. Sometimes acronyms form words (FAT, NIC, or FOG (Free Open-source Ghost), etc.) and sometimes the letters of the acronym are pronounced (ASAP, AIB, CPU, etc.). Someone commented that since Adam and Eve were the first people they got to name everything. As far as we know, they didn’t use acronyms but then they didn’t have to deal with PCMCIA or OLPC or NSIT. Snake, on the other hand is a fairly simple concept. Though, perhaps they should have told each other, WOFTS (Watch Out For That Snake).

So we will go on creating acronyms to try and efficiently communicate complicated ideas and we’ll try to come up with appropriate ones that improve communication rather than hinder it– because we are always in a hurry.

To be S3D you have to see

2010-05-14T15:08:13Z

James Cameron called me the other day and told me (he never asks) I should pay more attention to 3D. I told him I’ve been involved in “3D” longer than he has been making movies, and what he really meant was Stereo-3D, or S3D. He didn’t get it, but he will. Maybe about the time I convince Jeffrey Katzenberg to say S3D.

These movie types think they’ve just discovered imposibideum, like it’s some secret force of nature that was just lying under the surface waiting for them to remove the plenum and re- veal it to the rest of us. Obviously they never had a Viewmaster, went to the movies in the 50s, or played any PC games in the 90s. Newsflash guys: S3D ain’t new.

Which leads to the logical question (possibly answered by Kathleen Ma- her’s Practicality Gap)—how come we are not already using S3D—why now?

The first thing you hear is, “dopey glasses.” Do you wear sun glasses? Do you wear reading glasses? Do you wear glasses when you go to the mov- ies or watch TV or use your computer? What’s with the glasses thing? Glasses have been with us since before Ben

Franklin made them a style statement. What makes them dopey? Is it the red- blue filters that don’t exist anymore? Is it the frame size from the old Crystal- Eyes units from the 90s? Get over it. Oh, it’s that your PC glasses aren’t compatible with my TV. Why is that my problem? Your PC’s program disc isn’t compatible with my TV either. Maybe you don’t like the glasses be- cause of the headaches you get because you’re pregnant, drunk, and have been driving an 18-wheeler for 18 hours. What the hell are you talking about? Do you think it makes you cool to be negative and critical about new (old) technology? Get over yourself. You don’t want to use S3D? Fine, don’t. Don’t use anything you don’t want to use. Did you have this refusal to use new stuff when you were first shown a PC? Boy, I’ll bet the mobile phone must have really upset you.

So as my pals, Cameron, George (Lucas), and Jeffery have been telling anyone who’ll listen, S3D is not com- ing—it’s here and you’re going to be using it, loving it, and probably even advocating it.

But wait a minute, those are movie guys. They’re talking about the movies, that 24 frame/sec, six week render- ing time 2k x 2k 40 bit color stuff— not computers, not TVs, not mobile phones, or in-car entertainment sys- tems. What about S3D on all that other stuff?

It’s also here, or on its way. Nvidia has been bragging about 425 games available with their 3D vision, 3DTV has been demonstrated in the U.S., Eu- rope, and Japan. And maybe there’s not a broadcast standard, but there is proof of concept, and not only that—demand for it. Already the TV set suppliers are selling “3D ready” TVs—whatever the heck that is (OK, I know, its code for 240Hz). And there are 2D-to-3D real time converters that will take existing streams and DVDs and give you an S3D presentation on your 3D-ready TV.

Mobile phones are behind the curve but once a major brand like Apple, Nokia or LG brings out a couple of parallax-barrier models, then it’s off to the races in handheld land.

Last to the party will be in-car en- tertainment and nav systems. (I don’t know why we make that distinction, I find my nav system pretty darn en- tertaining, especially when she says, “Turn around stupid, you missed the exit again.”)

Of course, professional graphics and visualization systems have been using S3D for decades and loving it. There’s nothing more exciting than to watch a subterranean geophysical 3D map in pseudo color with its glowing pulsating gas and tar pockets. And have you seen those MRI shows? Wow.

As you may have figured out by now, we’re about to release a new market study on the S3D PC market— think you can guess what our position on it is? I’ll give you a hint—in 2014 it’s $75 billion. Are you loving that? And there will be glasses.

To 3D or not 3D, that’s no longer the question

2010-04-28T18:40:25Z

Visual stereoscopy, also known as S3D, has definitely come to the PC. It was actually always there, just not exposed. Soon there will be video stereoscopy available on your TV, you can see cinematic stereoscopy now in most metropolitan theaters in the industrialized world, and this time next year most new smartphones will offer web, game, and video stereoscopy content via auto-stereoscopic glasses-free displays. All of this gets bundled in the phrase “3D.” Obviously “3D” leaves a lot to be desired in terms of meaning and to the people using it.

Yes, issues still exist and probably will for a couple of more years, as Luis Giglioti, Metro 2033’s creative director at THQ said at the 3D Gaming Summit, “we’re just taking baby steps now.” And Greg Spence, lead programmers on the S3D version of Everquest II agreed. In demos shown at the conference there were lots of artifacts like ghosting, inter-axial spacing and depth issues that were obvious, and the unwanted effects caused by them brought out the critic in everyone. All of sudden everyone was an expert, or a naysayer on S3D. Baby steps.

Mark Rein sees the big picture and with a wave of his hand pushes aside the objections, “It’ll happen, that will all be taken care of” he says with his usual flair and enthusiasm. He sees a different challenge—changing the user interaction with an S3D game. Rein wants the user to be able to reach in, and move about in the scene and thinks Natel and Wii2-like technologies will get us closer to that capability.

Everyone who was not a naysayer pretty much agreed shutter glasses were better than passive polarized versions. For one simple reason: shutter glasses give you full resolution, and as Phil Eisler mentioned in the demo area, you can lie on your side and watch an S3D movie with shutter glasses, something you can’t do with polarized glasses—I never thought about that before.

Neil Schneider, the self appointed cheerleader for S3D, challenged the game developers to do a better job and take into consideration frame rate, film grain, and depth—that earned him another wave of Rein’s hand.

But Neil did raise the issue that doesn’t seem to get much discussion except at esoteric S3D conferences. Again, Rein seemed to put his finger on it and said games today are being done after the fact, in the Nvidia driver. When games are made for S3D from the beginning, things like individual scene compensation for depth will be made.

However, the game developers are certain a game player will be willing to wear glasses for six to eight hours. It’s one thing to wear them for a couple of hours in a passive situation like watching a movie. Still, in a AAA FPS that gets played for many hours glasses may become annoying. As Giglioti pointed out, there haven’t been enough systems sold yet to give any meaningful feedback from the users.

It’s pretty clear from all the discussions that given the differences in humans we will have to have explicit adjustment available for inter-axial distance, and depth. Games may have an auto-setup mode as they do now for lighting and AA filtering, with a manual override for advanced or expert users. Baby steps.

Consoles will not be too attractive for S3D given their five year old technology and the preponderance of 60 Hz TV displays. The consoles don’t have the graphics horsepower, bandwidth, or memory to generate to 60 Hz HDTV images even if the screen was available.

I’ve long felt there wouldn’t be a next generation console because the technology is moving so fast and the games are getting so demanding. However, Reins suggested that if there is a next gen S3D this is going to be one of the justifications for it. That will happen when Moore’s law makes it possible to deliver the kind of performance in a $300 box that now is available in a $1,000 + PC. However, Darkworks thinks their slightly anaglyph S3D approach will bring S3D to existing consoles now, and the examples we saw led me to agree with them. We’ve got a discussion in this issue on Darkworks’ solution. And there is a new technology approach coming out of ET3D based on work done at the Aerospace Corporation (a U.S. federally funded not-for-profit lab) that has a novel no glasses approach. Another similar no-glasses approach is that from Masterworks which has a matrix screen it puts in front of a LCD display—we’ve covered that too in this issue.

Glasses are a bit of a problem, even though I challenge people who complain to tell me if they ever wear sunglasses. But, using myself as a test subject I don’t think I can wear glasses for extended periods of time. It’s not uncommon to play a game in excess of four or six hours. I know I get tired of the S3D effect after about 45 minutes—I think my record is maybe an hour and then I take them off and turn off the S3D and continue the game. I plan to test this further and subject some of our people to be guinea pigs as well. We’ll, of course, let you know how it turns out.

Moving toward the edge —it may be uncomfortable there

2010-04-16T19:10:14Z

This week’s issue of Tech Watch looks at the inflection point we are entering with the end of the IGP and the introduction of the IPG—Integrated Processor Graphics. The question is, or at least one important question is, how does the IPG affect the discrete GPU? We also take a look at the latest, greatest GPUs from ATI and Nvidia, and we reviewed some massively multi-monitor systems. All of these developments are pushing the edges of conventional computer componentry and our concepts of what is normal. It all adds up to what’s called an inflection point or disruptive technology by pundits who prefer popular platitudes to regular English.

These technological developments present the consumers, scientists, enterprise, and the suppliers, with some interesting challenges to their current behaviors. Most of the new developments discussed in this issue were built because they could be, not because there was a serious unmet demand for such technology. In some cases it’s part of the normal evolution of technology, in others it’s an attempt at differentiation, and in the case of error-correcting memory in the GPU, an actual requirement to enter the super computer club.

In the case of the dying IGP, there are many who will not miss the durable little, often maligned, processor. It presented its own disruption to the way things used to be. It also brought tremendous value and adequate satisfaction to hundreds of millions of users, and forced the techno-priests to consider the concept of good enough and the rate of change of hardware technology versus the adoption of that technology by the software applications and consumers.

As for the IPG, it was, as proponents of Moore’s law profess, inevitable. Integration of adjacent functions to the most important device is not only to be expected, but planned for. It simply is a race to see who can get there first and write some if not all of the rules for the followers. That’s called competitive differentiation, and so far no one has really claimed that flag of honor.

However, AMD is expected to capture the flag first when they formerly introduce their Fusion architecture embodied in the first instantiation as their Llano processor. If it is as powerful an integrated heterogeneous processor as is expected, it will further encroach on the discrete GPU’s territory just as the IGP has. The difference this time will be the level of performance and the range of applications. The irony of it is AMD is doing exactly what is taught in MBA courses—be your own worst competitor.

Big viz changes the way we work

With the seemingly unstoppable march of technology’s evolution, particularly in the hardware side, we see, literally, amazingly inexpensive massive display systems being introduced. And although there is a small cadre of large scale visualization users who need and encourage such developments, they do not represent a large enough market opportunity to justify the development costs for these huge display surfaces. This is truly a case of doing it because you can, and hoping that if you build it they will come. I think the developers are going to be pleasantly surprised. Further support for that forecast comes from Samsung, which has invested heavily in the development of monitors that can be tiled with the absolute minimum of interference by the construction of the monitor. Other approaches with curved surface displays will challenge the common wisdom on the delivery techniques of stereoscopic imagery—perhaps we don’t need alternate views of the parallax, maybe high resolution and wide peripheral coverage will be like the old IGP and be good enough. If it is, (and Imax may have already proven that case even before the widespread use of stereo 3D) then it becomes a universally attractive solution that just needs to be pushed down the economy of scale curve to make it affordable. In short, large-scale images that more than fill a person’s field of view, provide a sense of being surrounded and have depth. A six monitor, single board display system of edgeless monitors is a good start, and two boards with twelve monitors could be the ultimate manifestation of such an implementation—no glasses required.

All of these developments are pushing the edge of our heretofore-comfortable computer commune. They will challenge our thinking about what’s needed, necessary, and what’s normal. And slowly we will adopt these developments just as we moved from CGA monochrome displays to HD displays in our laptops, PCs, and TVs. It won’t happen nearly as fast as the hardware developers want, and too fast to suit the software suppliers (who would like the entire industry to be like a game console—stable and unchanging for five to ten years so they can maximize their ROI), and it will be confusing for most
consumers.

The evolution of the computer industry has never been smooth and orderly, and let us hope it never will be because that’s when it will stagnate. So bring on the chaos, it’s good for us to get pushed to the edges and out of our comfort zones.

Almost every year Intel’s Paul Otellini gets to be proven right

2010-04-02T15:45:32Z

Paul Otellini says no other architecture has ever survived other than the x86. He cites RISC, Transputer, SGI’s geometry processor, array-processors, DSP, and others. Now he can add the Cell to his list.

Last month, Sony said they would not do a Cell 2 for the next gen PlayStation, and last week IBM said they would not develop a Cell 2 for their next gen servers. The noble if somewhat limited Cell experiment is over. Alas poor Cell, we never knew you well.

The Cell suffered from an awkward programming structure and lacked some critical inter-processor linkages. One could say all the failed architecture’s demises were due to software; no one wanted to learn Occum, DSPs were notoriously difficult to program, and every FPGA vector processor came with a unique instruction set.

Of course, the one processor Otellini would like to see die is the GPU, and Larrabee was supposed to be the GPU killer. That little drama has had an interesting twist to it, and we’re not really sure if the fat lady has sung yet or not.

The power density of x86 cores doesn’t seem to scale as well as those of the GPU, so a Larrabee array may never be realized as a competitive product. (The 80-core technology demos Intel has shown aren’t enough.) That might be awkward for Otellini’s law but merely as a special case. And in a faint acknowledgement of the power-efficiency of the GPU architecture, Intel is launching three new processors with GPU cores built into them.

Otellini’s law has got to be troublesome for companies like Tensilica, AAA, Sun/Oracle, and maybe even IBM, but it doesn’t seem to faze ARM, ARC, or MIPS—yet. Here is where Intel is making a big bet in the form of Atom and Moorestown. If Moorestown can hit the power points Intel is predicting for it, then the IP RISC suppliers will for the first time have a serious competitor.

Otellini’s law is also weighted by the marketing muscle of Intel. The company’s sheer size and the enormous pile of legacy software built on x86 make it difficult for any other architecture to compete regardless of its merits. That is the main advantage ARM and its IP companions have had in their worlds; no x86 software to contend with. And, ironically, it will be Moorestown’s burden to contend with various (13 as of now) operating systems in the mobile device market. That is one reason why Intel has developed Moblin and made a partnership with Nokia on MeeGo.

Whereas it was once thought the Intel-Microsoft axis would take over the world, Microsoft now finds itself under strong attack at the top from Linux, and at the bottom from Google and other Linux-like OSs. Had Microsoft succeeded in the mobile device space, Intel would have been an easy winner.

So Otellini will continue to collect pelts of fallen and failed architectures but he’s got his work cut out for him in the GPU and mobile device space.

We’ve just sized the mobile device market, breaking it up into ten segments. and ARM is the only processor to appear in all the segments. The mobile device market is just under 600 million units a year now, growing to 1.3 by 2015 or roughly 2x the PC market. That’s an attractive adjacent space and Otellini wants some it, maybe all of it. He’s just got to get all the participants to obey the law.

Can’t hold still? VIA can fix it

VIA Technologies just announced their VIA VX900 media system processor, which they describe as a full featured single chip solution. They are coupling it with the latest VIA Nano-3000 Series processors and say the combo will bring truly stunning video playback to the latest HD online video services.

The VIA VX900 MSP features the VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 video engine, and VIA says that little engine has the right stuff to give you hardware acceleration of the H.264 codec technology that is driving today’s advanced online HD video streaming services. According to Richard Brown, Vice President of Marketing at VIA Technologies, “The VIA VX900 brings crisp, smooth 1080p HD video content to life without hogging key system resources or resorting to an additional third party decoder.”

Support for the latest Blu-ray titles with VC1 and H.264 codec is bolstered, says VIUA, with acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and the latest WMV formats. The latest connectivity standards are supported and include dual channel support for Display Port, HDMI, DVP, VGA and LVDS/TMDS.

The VIA VX900 MSP can use the latest DDR3 system memory at speeds of up to 1066MHz and is compatible with the VIA Nano, VIA C7 and VIA Eden processor families. The VIA VX900 integrates all the features of a traditional North and South bridge solution into a 31mm x 31mm single chip package, offering a reduced overall silicon footprint compared with competing twin-chip core logic implementations.

The combination of the VIA VX900 and the VIA Chrome9 HCM 3D integrated graphics core provides DirectX 9.0 support and a 128-bit 2D engine with hardware rotation capability. The VIA VX900 uses a high bandwidth PCI Express 2.0 interface with one x8 lane and three single lane PCI Express II expansion slots, two PCI slots and a VIA Vinyl HD 8 channel audio codec.

An IDE controller, support for two SATA II drives, SD/MMS/MMC card reader support and 8 USB 2.0 ports are supplemented with support for PS/2, UART, SPI, GPIO and LPC technologies. Fast Ethernet and Gigabit connectivity options are provided through a dedicated controller.

	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	CAGAR
Total Mobile Device Shipments	597.4	682.9	771.8	881.9	1,014.7	1,164.7	1,335.1	14.3%

On seeing more

2010-03-19T22:21:40Z

Peddie’s second law is—The more you can see the more you can do. Looking good, feeling better.

And if you’ve looked at my blog, you will see what I’m currently experimenting with to test that theory. And a test it will be, when you have a video wall in front of you, your operational dynamics change. If all the displays are filled with individual applications, then you want the screens about 60cm or two feet or less away from your eye. If you are using all six in an extended desktop mode then you want them a meter or three feet or more away. That’s something that is not discussed much when setting up multi-monitor systems. Put another way, if you could have single screen that was sixty-inches wide and twenty-four inches tall with resolution of 5760 x 2160 where would you place it?

So the “lean-forward, lean-backward” metaphor has new meaning—for movies and games you’ll want to lean backward, but for work, you’ll want to lean forward. This suggests a wall mount with a pivoting arm, or a bodacious stand with such an arm. And that suggests new market opportunities for peripheral sellers. EVGA solved the problem nicely with their swing dual monitor setup they call the Interview, but that may not scale easily to six monitors.

The more you can see the more you can do … Indeed. Suppose you could see infinite detail in your image? Have you ever played with fractals?

They are confounding in that they subdivide forever—you can drill in and in and in and never hit the end. But they are synthetic procedural images and although delightful to look at don’t serve any practical use. But what if you could just see more of an important image, a computer generated image used for maybe a movie or a game?

A major Holy Grail in computer graphics is the creation of a picture that is absolutely indistinguishable from real life. And some folks will tell you we’ve done that with the advanced ray-tracing techniques that have been developed. However, ray-tracing is only successful (in a reasonable amount of time) to generate nice solid objects like tables, cars, and buildings. Ray-tracing is literally like watching paint dry if you try to render an organic scene of say a forest or herd of sheep on a dusty road.

Advanced lighting techniques like those developed by Luxology and StudioGPU can create very realistic images of organic scenes and solid objects, but they are not mathematically accurate. One of our friends at a CG company says “who cares? Does it look realistic; is it pleasing to the eye? Are the Dutch masters mathematically accurate?” Totally valid points.

And speaking of points, that conveniently leads me to voxels and point-clouds. Voxels can theoretically give us the ultimate in a realistic and mathematically correct image of any scene, organic or object, and in our lifetime. And for the ultimate generation of a mathematically correct image you can scan a scene, a building or car with a laser, produce a point cloud, and then render it. Now you are challenged by the number of points or voxels you can generate or scan. In the latest issue of Tech Watch you can read about Ultimate Detail, an upstart little company in Australia, who thinks they’ve come up with a solution for managing voxels in a timely manner to give you, well, ultimate detail.

The problem with voxels and points and ray-tracing, and CG is subdivision. A pixel, especially a screen pixel, is woefully inadequate for representing the real world. The real world is much finer grained than 100 DPI or 100,000 DPI. So if you construct an image through any of the previously mentioned methods you have to be able to subdivide the final pixels, the ones that will get thrown at your cones and rods. Or …

You can add more pixels, and that takes us back to the giant screen sitting in our lab right now. It’s still limited to ~ 100 DPI, it just has more “I’s”—inches. But magic happens. It’s called subtended arc and it’s why our mobile screens look as good as they do when they are only 160 DPI. So even though the DPI is limited, more pixels are filling in the subtended arc of our viewing position—putting more pixels right in front of our eyes—and our clever brains translate this into a “better” picture with a pseudo higher DPI—so we are not only seeing more, we think we’re seeing better too.

And as my CG friends said, if it looks good who cares? Remember darling, it’s not how you feel that counts, it’s how you look.

A look at the future—maybe

2010-03-02T14:22:47Z

We’ve spent some intense and serious time with the AMD folks recently, in Las Vegas, Texas, Santa Clara, here in our labs, on the phone and by email, and we’ve gotten a pretty good understanding of the company’s plans and people—or so we’d like to think (or maybe they’d like us to think…). Putting aside Machiavellian schemes and ideas for novels, being able to understand a company and its people keeps you from making toady comments, misstating facts, and hopefully making bad forecasts. It also helps you better understand other companies in the market.

AMD is into sweets-SSSS

In June of 2008, ATI introduced their Sweet Spot Strategy (SSS) in graphics, basically changing the rules of engagement on how GPUs would be built and employed in AIBs and elsewhere. It seemed a brilliant concept at the time and we all waited to see how it would play out. Turns out it’s played out pretty well and, except for some supply constraint issues, would have propelled ATI to the forefront in market share.

In February of 2010, ATI introduced their Server Sweet Spot Strategy (SSSS.) Basically changing the rules of engagement in how Servers would be built and employed in systems and elsewhere. It seems like a brilliant plan and there’s some discussion about it in this issue.

In August 2008 AMD introduced their Sweet Spot Strategy for singularity (SSSS) in chipsets. Basically, the company began to show signs of being a true platform provider.

This week, the company introduced their latest, best, and last IGP, the 890GX, and there are, I think, some tales in it. IGPs, as you know, have to be small and inexpensive and ATI’s are. They also have to provide as much performance as the silicon and price budget will allow in order to justify their existence—and for the most part the suppliers have been doing that with “good enough” offerings, and sometimes better (i.e., Ion, and the 790GX).

The 890GX is remarkable for a variety of reasons, and one might ask why AMD would put out such a powerful chip, with 40 unified shader processors in a low cost, limited lifetime product?

First, one more data point. You will recall that ATI invented the unified shader before Microsoft implemented it with DirectX 10. ATI invented the unified shader for Microsoft for the Xbox360, and used it again in the Nintendo Wii. ATI/AMD now has several years of making very small unified shaders.

The next sweet thing

Later this year, AMD will introduce their first Fusion product, Llano—the monolithically integrated multicore CPU and graphics processor.

This will be another shot at a sweet spot—namely the value and midrange of desktops and laptops and will be AMD’s Sweet Spot Strategy for Synergy (SSSS.)

Llano will be built in 32 nm, at Global Foundries—AMD has shared that much—in fact they are being built now in preparation for engineering sample deliveries to interested OD and OEMs. And from what we’ve heard those OD and OEMs are very interested.

Specifications have been more difficult to come by and so we’re left to our speculations. I believe Llano will be based on a shrunken Phenom II with a much larger and coherent cache for communicating with the GPU portion of the device. And I think the 55nm built 890GTX shows us that Llano will have well north of 40 unified shaders in it, so I’m guessing 64 is the right number.

Also, I’m guessing Llano will have Direct Connect 2.0 and the ability to attach a sea of memory to it for those folks who want to do heterogeneous computing.

Let’s C if we can compute

As of now, AMD is relying on OpenCL as the programming environment for its heterogeneous offerings. And, as I’m sure you noticed, AMD recently announced they have ported OpenCL to their CPUs, as well as their GPUs. Of course, it makes common sense for AMD to do that. Intel will do it too, but the most interesting part is that it is a perfect prelude to an integrated heterogeneous product isn’t it? Sweet.

And now the bad news. Whereas AMD is doing just about everything right on the hardware side, they are way behind on the software side. Relying on OpenCL as their programming environment will put them in good stead with the programming and OEM community, but it’s like watching paint dry before you have anything useful. Say what you will about Nvidia’s CUDA being proprietary, and how much everyone hates such things—it is nonetheless the current industry standard and more than that it’s the industry’s darling if the enthusiasm at SC09 was any measure.

What if you threw a party and no one showed up? That could be AMD’s fortune if they don’t get their programming act together. They might show up this fall with the amazing and sweet Llano and no tools to use it with—that would not be very sweet.

Look at me when I talk to you

2010-02-16T19:47:54Z

About ten years ago, I wrote an editorial suggesting our PCs could, and should, look at and listen to us. And when they did they would be able to see if we were happy, angry, sad, impatient, or bored. They would know when we were dictating a memo, story, or email, and when we were giving them commands to open a file or get a program. I even went so far as to suggest eye-tracking as a replacement for the mouse. I never suggested hand waving as an alternative input mechanism because of my experience many years ago with a light-pen. For those of you too young to know what that is, the early CAD and computer drawing systems used a pen-like device that was pressed against the display’s screen and would allow the drawing of lines. Inside the light-pen was a photo sensor and the computer would (very quickly and usually unperceptively) scan the screen looking for it. Although you could draw very accurately with that technique, your arm got tried pretty quickly. Try it—hold your arm out toward your display and see how long you can. So for that reason, moving your hand off the desktop (from the mouse, touch pad, trackball or joystick), and suspending it in air does not seem very “natural” to me. But, you can wink at your screen, and look at various parts of it.

Obviously as we get surplus amounts of MIPS, various non-physical contact user interfaces will be tried. And like most things one size or technique won’t fit all (just as some people use a track ball and others prefer the nimble in the keyboard.)

But the computer will look at and listen to us. My computer listens to me almost every day. In fact this editorial was “written” using speech recognition software (Dragon Naturally Speaking v.10) as were several of the other stories in this issue. You can’t tell by reading it, because any mistakes that the software might have made have been corrected as is the case, whether you’re typing it or saying, there’s always an editor.

Although we have the computing power to do the image processing necessary to allow a PC’s camera to watch us, the resolution of most cameras in use today is just VGA. HD cameras are dropping in price and readily available and will be needed if we are to get truly useful and reliable facial and gestural recognition.

Imagine now that we do have such capability, and that we also have adequate bandwidth for video conferencing. Think about the possibility of having your computer’s image processing software evaluate the stress levels in the person you’re communicating with via videoconferencing and reporting to you if your computer thinks your correspondent is lying? Such communications could revive person-to-person communications and lead us back from relying so much on e-mail and text messaging. It certainly would be a useful capability when negotiating a contract with someone. It would also be helpful for people doing online dating. Imagine the savings you would realize by not having to drive to a coffee shop or bar to meet someone for the first time.

Of course, the gaming aspects are well understood, and in fact it was the Wii that ignited the imagination of so many with regard to the potential of gestural and visual vacations with a computer. Human interface studies will be needed to determine the best movements to use to communicate with, and control, the computer. You can envision a common set of operations similar to what we have developed over the years for the operation of an automobile. However, there’s also the possibility of making your computer tamperproof by having a unique set of gestural communications that would prevent anyone else from operating your computer if they didn’t know those moves.

The downside of speech recognition is the noise level colleagues have to tolerate while you are speaking to your computer. It’s not dissimilar from hearing one side of the conversation when someone is using a telephone or mobile phone. The difference is the continuity of speech is more coherent and therefore more distracting.

These will be evolutionary changes, not revolutionary, as PC manufacturers slowly adopt and incorporate high-resolution cameras in the displays. Eventually it will evolve to the point where there are two cameras in the display and will be able to use stereo vision. Two cameras also give you better distance capability so that the user’s position can better track and be used for determining the mood and intonation of communications. Single lens 3D (depth) sensors like Canesta promise a great potential for a low-cost solution. We expect other 3D sensors to appear in the market very soon.

We’re experimenting here at JPR with ambient sensing sound systems that recognize limited instructions such as “wake-up computer,” “lights out,” “start coffee pot.” The bits and pieces to set up these types of systems already exist from a hardware point of view, and mostly exist from a software aspect. They lack universal standards, and so therefore each system, today, is custom. Therefore, I encourage you to build such systems, experiment with them and learn from them. Share your knowledge and help us move forward in more natural communications with our omnipresent companion.

The middle ground—is there one or many?

2010-02-03T18:30:25Z

When Steve Jobs presented the iPad, he set up the premise that we have smart phones, and we have laptops, and there is a gap between them that should be filled. As he made his presentation, I thought, I just saw this presentation a few weeks ago in Las Vegas. Jen-Hsun Huang did it at CES. Huang said the exact same things, and showed tablets that would fit in the middle.

And then I thought about Intel, who also wanted to fill the perceived middle. Intel called it a mobile Internet device—MID. Intel wasn’t successful in creating that category, but a lot of interesting products were created that were neither mobile phones nor PCs. We called them gadgets, and now Intel has also adopted that term. And, some of those gadgets are tablets.

Tablets, of course, aren’t new. We first started talking about them in 1970, and the first commercial product was shown in 1989, when GRID computer introduced the pen-based GRIDpad, 12 years before the Windows XP tablet, and four years before the Newton. A whole community was built up around the notion of a touch sensitive, large-screen mobile device, but no general-purpose usage model could be found for them. They were a solution in search of a problem. They did get applied in some special applications like insurance adjusters and a few doctors tried to use them.

HP introduced a novel version with a two-axis rotating screen that would lie flat for touch operation, or swivel up for convention clamshell laptop operation. Kathleen Maher has one and still uses it. But those early tablets were really just PCs with a big touch screen. And what Jen-Hsun Huang, Steve Jobs, and Paul Otellini are searching for is something that’s neither man nor beast—a narmachine. Have they found it in the tablet?

Probably not. The tablet as conceptualized by Apple is a unique device in that it doesn’t use a PC’s OS. It uses a processor found in most mobile phones with the same graphics engine as the iPhone, but some similarities are to be expected. The iPad is YAG—yet another gadget, like the Kindle, the TomTom, the PSP, the digital picture frame, etc.

I like the iPad, I hope to get one. And I won’t toss my notebook, PSP, or Kindle out. Those devices serve a purpose very effectively and I doubt that as clever and pretty as the iPad is it will be able to match my existing device—but that could just be me being stuck in habit—I’ll try to fight that and give the iPad every opportunity to prove itself.

We’ll know more this time next year as we visit coffee shops, trade shows and attend meetings. Will we see lots of people using a tablet (from the dozen or so providers who will emerge this year)? And what will we see the year after that? Are we on the cusp of a paradigm shift in usage?