Printed electronics: ink on the brink - 8/16/2007 - EDN

Printed electronics: ink on the brink - 8/16/2007 - EDN: "Printed electronics may be the next big thing in our technological future and promises extremely low-cost, flexible, and disposable circuitry that you can manufacture with custom ink-jet printers or high-speed presses. Leading-edge companies are using specialized ink technology to transform basic circuit elements, such as thin-film transistors, resistors, inductors, and capacitors into printed batteries, displays, sensors, RFID tags, interactive packaging, solar panels, and even speakers. Although the printed-electronics concept has been around for years, recent advances in conductive-ink chemistry and flexible substrates promise to deliver a flood of new markets and application areas."

Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click - 8/16/2007 - EDN

Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click - 8/16/2007 - EDN: "These examples of gesture-recognition interfaces are direct-control interfaces, in which users explicitly tell or direct the system to do what they want. However, the emerging trend for embedded or “invisible” human-machine interfaces is an area of even greater potential. Embedded processing, which is usually invisible to the end user, continues to enable designers to make their products perform more functions at lower cost and with better energy efficiency. As the cost of sensors and processing capacity continue to drop and the processors are able to optimize the essential functions of the systems they control, an opportunity arises for the extra available processing to provide an implicit or embedded human-machine interface between the user and the system. In other words, users may imply their intent with the system without consciously being aware they are doing just that. This emerging capability is essential to enabling systems to use predictive compensation to better accommodate a user's inexperience or errors and allowing the system to still perform what the user intended."

» Building an energy efficient home computer | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com

» Building an energy efficient home computer Storage Bits ZDNet.com: "You say you want a revolution? Energy efficient data centers are in the news again, with the EPA reporting that data centers use 1.5% of US electricity - almost 6 million home’s worth - and doubling in five years. But what about your home data center? My house has 2 wireless routers, 3 systems, 4 monitors, 6 cores and 8 GB RAM. They don’t use as much power as a refrigerator, but I’d like them to be more efficient anyway."

The High-Tech Home of Tomorrow

The High-Tech Home of Tomorrow: "This may sound like science fiction, but companies have already developed the tools to make it reality. So says Peter Bongers, chief executive and co-founder of Living Tomorrow, a company that since 1991 has brought together top technology, consumer goods, and design firms to develop innovative products and then exhibit them to the public in specially designed museums.
Mind you, that future may not be realized for another decade or so in the U.S., Bongers says. But his company will give the public a glimpse of it much sooner.
Laboratory for Innovation
By next year, Living Tomorrow will break ground in San Jose, Calif., for its first U.S. museum. The 40,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to open in 2009. Bongers anticipates the project will cost $53 million. As with past installations, the San Jose museum largely will be funded by companies hoping to use it as a test kitchen for their upcoming, often out-there, products. 'We enable them to innovate much better,' says Bongers.
Once opened, the San Jose museum will offer $10 tours, showing off various product prototypes and rooms designed for the future. Visitors will be able to weigh in on products via handheld voting devices. They will also be able post opinions online. Roughly 300,000 people each year have visited past installations, Bongers says.
The first Living Tomorrow exhibit debuted in Brussels in March, 1995. Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates spoke at the opening. 'There is no doubt that the way we live will be different in the future,' Gates said at the time. 'The advances in PC technology and low-cost communications are bringing a revolution.' "

Wireless Sensor Networks are Making Buildings Green - Recent survey from ON World highlights increasing WSN adoption for building energy reduction. - Sensors

Wireless Sensor Networks are Making Buildings Green - Recent survey from ON World highlights increasing WSN adoption for building energy reduction. - Sensors: "SAN DIEGO, CA-- Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology's clean and inexpensive system deployments will result in more buildings using less energy, needing less maintenance, and producing lower carbon emissions, according to ON World. By 2011, global revenues for WSN commercial building solutions will be $2.6 billion.
Rising end user awareness and demand, a strengthening value system, and hardening standards is increasing WSN adoption in Green buildings worldwide. Twenty-five percent of commercial building energy reduction will be attributed to WSN in 2013, worth $7.4 billion in global energy savings.
'Energy management has always been a major driver for commercial buildings to adopt building control technologies, but now achieving Green status is becoming the primary driving force,' says Mareca Hatler, director of research for ON World. Driven by social and economic forces, building owners worldwide are adopting Green solutions in order to increase efficiency, lower costs, reduce operational risks, and satisfy the demands of customers, employees, and shareholders. "

Going Green - Sensors

Going Green - Sensors: "Considering some of the conversations I had at Sensors Expo last week, I read this recent release from ON World with a great deal of interest. It seems that wireless sensor networks (WSNs to those in the know) are increasingly being tapped for energy saving endeavors. "

Microsoft Surface - Milan

Computer worksurface with multitouch interaction. A device that looks like an ordinary table but is a computer that will interact wirelessly with handheld devices such as cameras, phones and PDA's. The user interface allows interaction with a multitouch touch screen surface.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

CREATE-NET International Research Center

CREATE-NET International Research Center

The demand of richer-content information (i.e. audio, video, virtual reality) and Multimedia traffic delivery over communication networks is increasing and will continue to increase in the coming decade. This trend characterized new immersive paradigms with two main requirements from both the network and the user perspectives. First, the new paradigms for multimedia networking with sophisticated content processing and efficient real-time delivery through heterogeneous networks. Second, new user-centric user interface paradigms where multimedia data will enhance the interaction and people's wellbeing in a revolutionary manner (i.e. 3D immersive mixed-reality remote interaction).

Our research results in this area will allow innovative pervasive scenarios, highly enriched with sophisticated 3D mixed reality and multimedia interactive content. This content will convey to us auto-configurable services wherever we are and whenever we need them.

» Don’t Look Back | The Great Seduction | ZDNet.com

» Don’t Look Back The Great Seduction ZDNet.com

So, at an event at which the great digital innovators celebrated innovation, the next big wave of innovation wasn’t clear. That’s worrying for those of us who value the exceptionalism of the digital business. Without constant innovation, digital will become routinized. Without revolutionary innovation, American personal computers will go the way of the American automobile. Silicon Valley will rust into Detroit. And the real innovators will move onto something else like biotech or green innovation.

Is there anything new out there in the digital universe beyond the absurdly over-hyped iPhone (just another expensive phone with music), inane user-generated-content sites and yet more search engines? Fortunately, there is. If Jobs can quote the Beatles on the past, then I can quote Bob Dylan (from “Ballad of a Thin Man”) on the future:

Because something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones

Actually, Mister Jones, I do know what is happening. If you scraped away the Bill and Steve show at D this year, the future could be seen. Or, more accurately, the future could be felt. The future, I suspect, is touch. The future is the integration of the computer into our physical reality. The dangerously metaphysical Second Lifers have it the wrong way around. The future is not a spiritual immersion into a fake world, but the immersion of the personal computer in our real world. The awkwardly oracular Bill Gates hinted at this when asked about his vision of digital life in five years time.

I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around, and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that…. I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. …. You’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet, and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment, and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information [on it]. Your desk can be a surface [where] you can sit and manipulate things.

Gates is wisely looking forwards rather than backwards here. Note, in particular, his faith in the “tablet form factor” and his notion of that our “desk can be a surface where you can sit and manipulate things.” What Gates is predicting that we’ll be able naturally write on our computers (ie: they will become like paper) and our desk will be a place in which the digital will spill into real life. Gates is saying that our whole desk will become a personal computer. The analog will be digitalized. The computer will become genuinely personal.

Ironically, the one company at D unambiguously showing off the future was Hewlett-Packard, the original Silicon Valley garage operation who have surfed wave after wave of digital innovation. At D this year, HP was displaying a stunning 16 ft wide by 8 ft tall fully interactive touch screen. The logical extension of their latest TouchSmart PC, this screen is a more natural, more human than the traditional computer screen. HP were also displaying visual content that moved seamlessly from screens onto the world around them, thus fusing together their displays with real life. And HP are promising many more technological breakthroughs which will allow other tactile gestural interactivity with our computers. This, rather than exploding coke bottle videos or flashy phones — might well be the future of digital. Tactile interactivity is what can make technology friendlier, more intuitive to all of us. This is what will seamlessly integrate digital into our analog lives.

» Microsoft to take the wraps off ‘PlayTable’ | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Microsoft to take the wraps off ‘PlayTable’ by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley -- After at least three years of sneak peeks, Microsoft is finally set to take the official wraps off its PlayTable multi-touch, gestural- and object-recognition interface technology. Sources say the unveilig of PlayTable -- which has gone by the codenames "Table" and, most recently, "Project Milan" -- could happen next week.