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HP Lab University 2007 - Past, present and future (II) |
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Hewlett Packard recently held the tenth HP Lab University press gathering in Lisbon. Michael Carabott was one of over 270 journalists who attended to test the new scanners, printers, cameras, PCs as well as to attend lectures on what computing will be like in the future and even to learn exactly how a camera’s lenses work.
The theme of this year’s university, the first one I have attended, was: “HP: Past, Present and Future”. There were a total of 10 sessions to choose from and I selected Through HP’s lens to photos, Personal computing connects, Inside the camera, The Future and Analogue and Digital Photography.
The sessions were split into two parts – a lecture, followed by practical hands on work to test the various HP products. During all the sessions, we were given the opportunity to quiz some of HP’s leading scientists, engineers and designers including HP’s chief technology officer Phil McKinney, camera expert Bob Gann and others.
The future
Wow! What a concept. Imagine being able to hook up an unlimited amount of projectors to a measly 486 processor and having the software being available to coordinate the images produced by them to form almost DVD quality picture on as big a screen as you can manage. Well, it can be done and Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera Venkata explained how.
HP Labs has invented a core enabling technology code-named “Pluribus” that combines the power of multiple inexpensive projectors to quickly and automatically create a scalable “super-projector”. Developed by Dr Damera-Venkata and Dr Chang, Pluribus is the only multi-projector paradigm to automatically deliver vivid image quality no matter how the projectors are configured. Through automatic calibration, it eliminates the costly and time consuming per-projector manual tweaking that is required today to ensure good image quality for today’s multi-projector systems.
Pluribus unifies the following benefits into a single framework:
· Automatic: Accurate and fully automated parameter estimation and model fitting via advanced computer vision techniques
· Real-time: Practical real-time rendering on commodity graphics hardware at interactive frame rates
· Flexible: A universal modeling framework capable of accurately modeling the behaviour of general multi-projector systems, not limited to just tiling or superimposed configurations
· Scalable: A framework that for the first time scales not only resolution but also along numerous other dimensions including brightness, colour, aspect ratio, bit-depth, frame rate and redundancy
· Vivid: Model-based algorithms that optimise image quality for arbitrary multi-projector configurations with no manual intervention.
Analogous to cluster computing, Pluribus could have a significant impact on display markets including gaming, digital cinema, home theatre, event projector, collaboration, and visualisation. There is nothing like testing such technology to make sure it is up to what it is supposed to be cracked up to be. What better way than to hook it up to an X-Box and play Pro-evolution soccer with life size players. With my British ties, it was fitting that I was pitted against a German journalist and proceeded to give him a good hiding. We actually had to have the controllers taken off us in the end as we got so into it. Truth be told – this has the potential to be a fantastic tool – not for the future, but right now. Imagine screening a DVD on whole façade of your house. You could do this, literally.
Mscape – A free toolkit to create and share mobile, interactive experiences
I was lucky enough to win an HP Ipaq handheld pocket pc during my time at labs. There were a number of Ipaq’s being offered as incentives in a draw if one paid enough attention to answer a quiz at the end of one of the sessions. It worked. Well, what is Mscape all about? In May 2007, HP announced a prototype software suite and website that enables people to design, create and share location-based experiences, games and tours with friends, family and others, anywhere in the world. The site makes available a new HP Labs technology, code-named “mscape,” that overlays digital sight, sounds and interactions on the physical world to create immersive and interactive experiences called mediascapes.
Users equipped with a GPS-enabled mobile device running the mscape player can move through the physical world, triggering digital media – including images, text, sounds, audio and video – in response to physical events such as location, proximity, time and movement. Blending online information with gaming, storytelling and the outdoors, mediascapes can offer people of all ages a new way to experience their surroundings.
The site, www.mscapers.com, allows designers of all ages to create, post and share their digital location-based mediascape experiences. Mediascapes can be created using simple, web-based authoring wizards. For more advanced mediascapes, a PC-based authoring toolkit is available for download. The mscape player is also available for mobile devices.
Unlike PC-based applications, mscape technology provides a highly interactive, fun and engaging experience when users are out and about in the real world. mscape’s context-sensitive logic, combined with GPS and mapping technology, allows gamers, travel, GPS and outdoor enthusiasts to take their experiences to a higher level. The solution is so flexible that different digital files can be overlaid in the same space and delivered at different times, depending on which other locations in the mediascape the user has already visited.
The website provides everything people need to develop their own mediascapes, including training and tips to get started. There are numerous ready-made mediascapes at the site, which can be downloaded by anyone with a GPS-enabled HP iPAQ or other handheld device running the Windows® Mobile operating system.
The mscape authoring tools are designed to be easy to use and provide near limitless opportunities for mediascape designers, including:
· Creating mediascapes to bring to life a community’s history and stories;
· Designing augmented reality games, sharing the fun with friends and strangers;
· New ways of socialising, entertaining and learning.
Once a user has created a mediascape, it can be published on the website so that others can try it for themselves. So what does this really mean then? Well, I took a guided tour of Lisbon simply using my Ipaq and my headphones. I plugged them in and was prompted by the machine everywhere I went. Think about it. You have a visitor, but don’t have the time to take them around Malta. You simply create the programme, load it up, and off they go. Fantastic. It really is becoming a smaller world. I had a chat with Tom Melamed, from HP Bristol who gave me a complete breakdown of what people can do with Mscape and it is simply too vast to put into words. You can even take it on holiday with you and load it up with pre-made software – goodbye guides.
The Ipaq
Like I mentioned above, I won an Ipaq, and I just wanted to reserve a little bit of space for this truly remarkable machine. First and foremost (apart from MSCAPE), it has a TomTom GPS system installed. Yep, you heard it right, a handheld PC with its own onboard navigation system. It is powered by windows, so you have everything you could possibly desire. Word, Excel, Email, windows messenger and many, many more features. Of course, you have Windows media player and full internet access with Wi-Fi. It also has a blue tooth connection and the possibility of upgrading storage capacity with an SD memory card. Needless to say I was thrilled to bits with it. I explored the features further and I found that I had the ‘traveler’ version. It features currency converter, time zone management, sizes, native phrases – well, in a sense – it’s a pocket PC travel guide that doubles up as a computer. By far the best feature though is the touch screen and light pen. Scribble away and your notes are taken down as you go. Very clever indeed. Once I got home I hooked it up to my desktop and there you go – two instant PCs. Lovely.
Submitted Date: Aug 28, 2007
Source: Malta Independent Online
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