Paul Golding's Weblog on Wireless

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

:: Air-texting ::

Following on from my earlier scattering on Graffiti, Emily Turrettini from textually.org sent me this:

"Re your article on grafitti, have you heard of airtexting? I have a post on textually.org today. And years ago I read an article about a Calif company called Neoku.com which developed a platform called HaikuHaiku (http://fetter.org/haikuhaiku/). The article in Wap.com is no longer available, and the company is not very explicit online. But at the time, it was described as a form of mobile graffiti, using a cell phone as a paint spraycan, and waving it into the air to form a word, the text would appear onto the screen of a person passing by. "

Thanks Emily.

I am excited by these developments (air-texting). 3G needs imagination and once people start to generate more ideas I think the excitement and products will gain momentum...

6:47:55 PM

:: Energy considerations for edge-processing ::

About my musings on edge-processing Dave from Motorola says:

"PS: thinking about processing at the edge, isn't the fundamental for a portable device going to be the energy cost of all transmission/reception involved vs the energy cost of local processing. Presumably there's some crossing point on the graph when the best solution changes. Although there needs to be a proxy energy cost for user waiting time I suppose.

Be interesting to see some figures ..."

Yes, it would be interesting to see some figures, though energy consumption is not the only, or necessarily best, cost metric in a case like this, albeit very important for mobile devices. The fundamental issue for me is tasks that will benefit the mobile user but which require processing power that is beyond the capabilities of the device. I already mentioned natural language processing, but another exciting area for me is near real-time language translation. This could be either audio - like speak into the device and get an immediate play-back in French, Spanish or whatever - or could be pictorial. Imagine pointing a camera phone at a sign or menu in Russia and using character recognition and translation to get an overlay in English.

This is just thinking out loud....my gut instinct is that edge-processing has something to offer, but the details need checking through. Needs more research....

6:41:16 PM

:: Wireless Any Network Digital Assistant - WANDA ::

TI just announced their latest mobile chipset - WANDA - that has Bluetooth, WiFi and GPRS all in one bundle. This is probably the future for most high-end PDA/Smartphone devices.

It would be great if a Bluetooth headset could be used for voice input on a PDA. However, the problem of processing power and accuracy may still dog progress. My earlier thoughts on edge-processing may help here, but I am also intrigued about using limited voice-recognition for common dictionary words in combination with something like T9 predictive text; perhaps such a hybrid or augmented approach has some merits. Needs some research....

1:48:28 PM

:: Graffiti and mobile phones - (and not the Palm hand-writing kind) ::

Sounds like a strange topic I confess, but I started looking into Graffiti culture for several reasons. Firstly I was just curious about this sub-culture and what the various spray-sprawls ("bombs") meant, and the strange signs ("tags"). Secondly, I was brain-storming ideas for mobile applications based on youth culture, trying to find ideas and inspiration, which I managed to do aplenty. Thirdly, I was approached to act as a consultant on an Internet project for hop-hop clothing - and graffiti has its roots in this culture.

What immediately intrigued me was the global reach of the graffiti culture, made all the more global by the sharing of "pieces" on the net (see links from my graffiti mind-map), with galleries from many cities showing the "bombing" activities of different "crews". It immediately became clear that picture-messaging and moblogging is bound to play a role in recording the illegal activities of many a "writer" or "tagger".

Combine this with location-aware devices and all kinds of crazy ideas begin to surface. Of course, it gives a whole new meaning to the term "air graffiti" or "virtual graffiti", referred to as geospatial notation at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference. This is where a user can leave notes hanging in space to be picked up by other passers by who enter the proximity area of the note, whatever the size and shape of that area happens to be. Not quite the same thing, but there seems to be a cultural link that may result in some interesting youth applications arising from the intersection of these two ideas. No reason why pictures can't be left hanging is space as well as sound and text. It has always been my view - and something I preach in my courses - that new applications will arise from youth street culture once they figure out what's possible....let's wait and see.

1:31:27 PM