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Brainstorming New Uses for a Mobile Processor
Lycestra asks: "When carriages became cars, cars still looked like carriages. This caused people to see them as much the same as carriages, which cars are not. Getting back to processors, now that we have one designed for long term portability, we need to get away from the dinosaur that is the personal computer. PDAs are different than PCs, but only because they are underpowered. If you look at the Newton2k, you've seen what an overpowered PDA can become. So, my question is, what /can/ we do, now that we can have a powerful micro-portable? I know this must go beyond just better battery life and wearables." What do you think Mobile Computing will be in the future? How will this differ from how we compute now?
1. email and internet surfing.
2. built-in GPS and mapping.
3. icq/gaim chat.
4. latest hot stock reports.
5. streaming audio/video.
6. built-in webcam.
7. integrated cell phone/answering machine/pager w/ caller ID.
8. built-in CD/DVD player. (mini-Japanese techno. size- all under 3/4" (1.9cm)
9. expansion/pcmcia slots.
10. 8-hour battery.
...some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant...
Windows CE devices, and a few others (like the philips genie cellphones) do voice recognition already.
And voice recognition is GOOD.
If we start building small devices, cell phones the size of a com badge for example, how the heck are we going to communicate with them?
It's only natural to use voice recognition when dialing with a cellphone and other small devices, unless you want to carry around a toothpick.
"PC" is an abbreviation for "Personal Computer." I don't believe the PC is obsolete, and it probably won't be for quite some time. Just like the first cars were known as "horseless carriages," we'll continue to use the term PC for what a new term will be needed.
I see in the future, not a society where information is retrieved at libraries, in the corner of someone's home, or at a workstation in an office complex. The PDA will become an extension of a PC, more so than ever before. Technologies such as Bluetooth and CDMA will allow PDAs to directly connect to the Internet with bandwidth which seems "overpowered" to us now. Processors such as the Crusoe and StrongARM series will give our "overpowered" PDAs a "real" engine to run "real" programs.
The Internet plays hell with our new definition of "Personal Computer." The boxs sitting on your desktop now will move to under your tables or hidden away in the basement. A silent blinking box with a wire to the Internet via your personal lan and net domain. Your PDA will connect to these systems and run the services YOU want. Mail, web hosting, data storage, and more data processing than your "overpowered" PDA will ever support. This can happen because the PCs will always have more space for more stuff than a PDA will.
I used to think protocols such as the ones used in X-Windows would be given a new life when this happens. Your PDA would become a simple X client to your P.C. at home. If you didn't have a PDA, there would be public access terminals that you could give your username and domain to log into and VIOLA, you'd have "full" access. However, I've reconsidered and see a world where the PDA is a condensed information processor with sensoria. You can do little tasks (surfing web, editing documents, and equiv) on your PDA, but when you need that SETI@Home client running, it'll be on your PC.
Maybe I've stolen quite a bit from authors like Greg Bear or Neal Stephenson. However, I believe we will have a completely different definition of the "Personal Computer" when we have a new architecture.
Great, so we can have a really small doohickey to do stuff quickly. The problem I see in the future of portable computing is interface. Get this little doohickey to understand me when I'm talking (or thinking) to it, then you've got a product. Until then, much smaller than a palm pilot, and you've got problems.
(1) Run in hotter environments such as outdoors or in desert climates, while still providing plenty of processing power.
(2) Run from within a totally air tight sealed metal box (CPU heatsinked to case) box. This lets machines operate in dirty, dusty, smokey environments, that would gunk up fans in no time.
(3) Run in isolated environments where high reliability is needed and maitenance personnel simply cannot check hardware often. e.g., radio repeater controller atop a mountain peak accessible only by helicopter. A cool CPU makes possible a machine with no moving parts to break down and lead to other failures.
Get the TM chips into desktop CPU's now!
1. Face recognition mode. I look at someone - mentally hit the "who the fuck are you" button - and I get a head-up-display of name, context, wife/children's names etc. Could also be used to make "advice" on food choices etc.
2. Deja vu mode. Hit another button and a data base of previous frames and situations is searched to tell me if this has actually happened before.
3. "I told you so"/"But you said..." mode. Quick search and replay of what was *really* said way back then.
4. Diplomacy mode. When you can't be bothered or you're too tired to consider what the right thing to say is, then a rolling AI-generated script appears before your eyes. Keep to the script and you stay out of trouble. Having the PDA activate my mouth and vocal chords automatically could also be cool but maybe a step too far.
5. Drive me home mode. PDA takes control of my limbs to let me sleep/read/watch TV on the way.
OK, rediculous impracticality limit reached. Time to go.
Regards, Ralph.
I have a dream. A dream I have had since 1992, when I first met a boy named Bobby. Bobby has cerebral palsy, and is extremely affected--he can move his left arm at the shoulder, but his elbow wrist and fingers are essentially rigid. Bobby has an electric wheelchair, which he can control with his left arm. Bobby cannot speak.
There is a cruelty to cerebral palsy--oftentimes there is a perfectly normal child trapped inside that horribly disfigured body. And, sooner or later, that child realizes that he is permanently, utterly, royally screwed. It will never get better--he will always be the Hunchback. (What is child abuse? Send a severely-affected CP kid to a school named "Notre Dame.")
Bobby's parents heard of me because of an educational game I created for kids with limited language skills. They asked if I could help Bobby. Long story--but the resulting program helped Bobby go from a "spoken" vocabulary of 0 to 400 words over the weekend. But--the program was written in Visual Basic, which required a PC. I had a dream....
What I've dreamt of for eight years is an Assistive Device. Plugged into an electric chair it provides the kind of smart battery intelligence that we take for granted with notebooks--but that is completely missing from wheelchairs. Gain #1--longer battery life for chairs. In the end user's chair we have the ability to extend the simple user interface for non-verbal users--they can "mouse" to the words or phrases they need ("excuse me", "is this the A4 bus?", "please let me off at the Whitehall Mall"). Using a recorded mix of Mom's voice and Dad's, the user "speaks" with a voice that is recognizably part of his family. Gain #2. With that UberPDA the end user can communicate with a buddy--"Help! I'm stuck on a sidewalk covered in snow!". With GPS and wireless our end user is never lost, and never alone. Gain #3. For the end user who is not permanently confined to a chair we can make the uberPDA wearable--using a simple handheld device he can identify the words or phrases he needs to say--and the device "speaks" them through speakers. If he is blind we can offer GPS-based guidance--and perhaps IR-based (or sonar?) collision-avoidance.
I have a dream. With big MIPS, big bandwidth, and very, very low power consumption we can give sight to the blind, and a voice to the mute. We can take the shattered and the crippled and let them experience that most precious of dreams: independence. Autonomy. Freedom.
In 1992 I wrote an article that stated that from that day forward I was a has-been: I had written the best software of my life, and from BobbyWrite onward all would be downhill. Perhaps--maybe--I was wrong. Perhaps, with the incredible advances of technology, we can take that nascent germ of an idea and make it really useful.
One can only dream of the possibilities....
While most folks think of the portable computer as an easy interface to a networked world, and a link back to all the disparate machines you need to use (home PC, work PC, ISP, soon house and car), I think it could become the logical place for storing your personal info and serving up the apps you want the rest of the world to see.
That way, the various desks you encounter will be nothing more than generic ports for high-speed access, high-featured interfaces, and peripheral usage.
What I'd like to see would be for this model to make it possible for my personal server to be THE secure, authoritative source of data about me (not the marketeer's databases) and to be the primary way that the world's computers (my employer, stores, government, banks, etc.) interact with me. If it also made digital cash possible, that wouldn't hurt, either.
Mind you, storage and bandwidth of portables needs to advance greatly to make this real, but you asked for a vision...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
With processors like the Crusoe, and other late make mobile processors, the power cunsumption would be dramaticly reduced, the heat output will be less, and if you have a good powersaving scheme in each processor, the power needs would dynamicly vary depending on the number of seperate threads needed at a given time.
True, this isn't a mobile system, but it is a definant possible side-effect of these new processors.
Or am I missing something?
Little Brother, watching the watchers