I recently visited the Deutsche Telekom Labs in Berlin, known as T-Labs. T-Labs are carring out basic and technology research that focuses on developing future-proof applications in a wide range of areas. Their research projects develop existing technologies based on the continuous scouting of forward-looking trends. One research team there is looking to usability as the mean to greatly improve the quality and, with it, the sales of interactive products. This team is exploring new ways of interacting with mobile devices.

They had the idea of a touchless data entry system that is based on the interaction between the magnetic fields around a device and a properly shaped magnet. The magnetic field that surrounds the device is generated by a magnetic sensor (compass) that is embedded in the new generation of mobile phones such as Apple iPhone 3Gs and 4G, and Google Nexus one. The small magnet could be worn for instance on a finger, if it is put on a ring: as the hand is moved around the mobile phone, the 3D interaction is measured and transformed in a command. This gestural interface extends to the peripheral area of the device without needing any extra element. The interface can be used to perform certain tasks, based on the pattern of the movement. These tasks can vary from entering a text or digit into the phone to turning pages or zooming while reading an e-book.

Here you can download and see a video of MagiWrite in action.

MagiWrite uses the compass to sense gestures.

I’ve concluded my last post (“Can Quantum Mechanics contribute to Social Sciences ?”) with a question: can we early detect tipping points at which sudden regime transition of a complex system’s behaviour may happen ?

Predicting such critical points before they are reached is extremely difficult, but it might have a huge impact in several fields, from medicine to business, from meteorology to social networking, from new materials to control of future networks.

Please have a look at this paper “Early-warning signals for critical transitions”

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7260/abs/nature08227.html

Paper is suggesting the analysis of generic early-warning signals indicating, for a wide class of complex systems, the approaching of a critical threshold, where small forces can cause major changes in the state. Examples of such transitions might include the collapse of over-harvested ecosystems, climatic changes, or stocks markets dynamics.

For example one symptom is the critical slowing down: when the system approaches a critical transition, it becomes increasingly slow in recovering from small perturbations (which is translated mathematically into an increase in the autocorrelation and variance of the fluctuations).

Another signal that can be seen in the vicinity of a catastrophic transition point is flickering. Stochastically, the system moves back and forth between the basins of attraction of two alternative attractors (bistable region).

Spatial patterns is a third example: an ecosystem may show a predictable sequence of self-organized spatial patterns as it approaches a critical transition (e.g. a semi-arid vegetation to increasing dryness of the climate).

Still many challenges have to be overcome: for example, how collecting meaningful data, filtering techniques to increase the sensitivity of indicators, preventing false positives and others.

In any case progresses in detecting early-warning signals might be valuable in several fields. I wonder if this theory can also be used in controlling stability of future networks and related business ecosystems.

Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretic physicist and one of the fathers of quantum and nuclear physics. He is well known for his mysterious disappearance. What is often unknown about Ettore, is his interest in economy and mainly social behaviour. In his last article, “The value of Statistical Laws in Physics and in Social Sciences”, he argued an interpretation of every phenomenon, natural and social, as governed by the fundamental laws of Quantum Mechanics.

He stressed the inappropriateness of classical attitude in considering Nature governed by deterministic laws. He argued that Quantum Mechanics suggests that there is an “essential analogy between physics and the social sciences”. In other words, he prospected an investigation of social behaviour with the Quantum formalism. But then he mysteriously disappeared and nobody has followed this avenue, at least until recently.

Some of his ideas are being recovered today in different fields such as economy (e.g. econo-physics) and neurobiology:  “previously I never could see the point of introducing quantum mechanics into discussions of consciousness. But here at least is a strict argument requiring the introduction of quantum indeterminateness”, said biologist John Searle.

I wonder whether Majorana’s take can be extended to emerging behaviours in complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and future networks. I have in mind a specific example: can we early detect tipping points at which sudden shifts of the a system’s behaviour to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur ? Predicting such critical points might be very advantageous.

Although the numbers forecasted by different sources can vary significantly there seems to be a consensus on the ubiquitous presence of sensors in our future (that is the one we are going to be in).

Cisco and Ericsson are expecting 50 billion of them by 2015, HP foresees 1 trillion by the end of this decade. To reach those figures sensors will need to be everywhere. Let’s dismiss immediately the concern that we cannot provide an identity to each of them: Ipv6 addressing scheme supports 1,500 identities per sq meter of the Earth surface, and 1,000 trillion sensors would require just ONE identity every 150 square meter!

However, placing sensors everywhere requires in many cases to have them fitting a variety of environment. One point in case is the embedding of sensors on deformable surfaces, like fabric (our dresses to name but one). Sensors technology is based on silicon that is a hard material impossible to stretch.

Stretchable sensors

But now, researchers at the Fraunhofer institute for Silicate Research ISC in Wurzburg have managed to develop sensors using elastomers. They can measure tension and pressure and can be stretched up to a point where they double their surface.

According to the researchers these sensors are just a few years away from the marketplace.

In a few years’ time, this is my bet. we will have sensors in any objects, including food packaging, and we will take for granted the interaction with objects.

This is a whole new area for telecommunications and there is a significant business involved. It is not about transporting bits (although this will remain a business), rather it is about delivery of services through the object and its interaction with us. The US is the key point from a biz point of view. We will be wiling to pay for customized interactions and that requires an intermediator to bring in the knowledge about us.
Welcome Web 3.0.

Few days ago NHK, the Japanese television broadcaster, demonstrated what television will be like in 2020. On a big 85″ screen they displayed a broadcast at a resolution of 8k, that is 16 times better than today’s HD TV and four times our eyes resolution.

This “four times our eyes resolution” is puzzling. Why would you want to display something that you actually cannot see? Well, the fact is that you can “feel it”. Our brain is creating an image, that is the one that we “think” we are seeing, on the bases of information coming from both eyes scanning the environment. So, if it is true that a single eye can only perceive about 8 Mpixel equivalent of resolution and the two together a bit more (there is a greater field of vision with the two eyes, but not so much more, binocular vision is mostly used to get the sense of depth and this is about processing, not vision), the final vision in our brain is closer to 20 Mpixel equivalent. Hence, the 4k standard, bringing in 8 Mpixel of resolution is a bit short, whilst the new 8k just demonstrated by NHK reaches 32 Mpixel

At this level of resolution you feel immersed in the image and it gives you the perception of “being there”.

Notice in the movie, the photographer getting close to the screen with their camera, trying to capture the single pixel!

NHK has declared they expect to start commercial service with Super Hi Vision (the 8k standard) at the end of this decade. At that point it is likely that broadcast will take place on the telecommunications fibre infrastructure, since it requires over 100 Mbps of bandwidth and the fibre in that range is more economical than radio spectrum (you need to broadcast many channels, each one at 100 Mbps,….).

This year I had not the opportunity to go and check CHI 2011 conference (Computer Human Interaction), which I consider as one of the most instructive conferences on interfaces, with a strong participation of both academy and industry research centres, like Microsoft, IBM, Xerox etc.

Anyway I had a look to the best awarded papers published online and one came to my attention: Microsoft Research and the formidable Desney Tan, one of the gurus of innovative interfaces in that company, have come out with such an easy to understand idea that I wonder why no one else have had it before (at least to my knowledge).

Our houses are cabled with electrical wiring and full of appliances: those generate some electromagnetic noise out in the surrounding environment (that noise that, at least in the past, was for instance annoying our AM radios…).

Now the MS researchers had the idea of using our own body as an antenna and measuring how we interfere with this noise, using machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to recognize our position inside the house plan and the gestures we do. In this way we could move one hand on the wall to control an appliance in the same room. Check all details of this concept in the awarded paper.

Analyzing the electrical wiring noise, the whole house can become an interaction surface.

You may have noticed that currently stereoscopic displays have only one parallax direction, the horizontal one.This means that you can look explore an object tridimensionally only moving to his right or left, but not up or down, which would require vertical parallax capability of the display. This applies to the 3D Cinema or TV set solutions that are based on eyewear, or to autostereoscopic displays like those used on the Nintendo 3DS.

Even more complex displays, like those developed and commercialized by Holografika, a hungarian company that patented a ray projection holographic display, are offering a mono-parallactic stereoscopic view: using several optical light projecting modules that are hitting each singular voxel (volumetric pixel) onto the “holographic” screen, they are able to recreate a wider angle view then other techniques can today. Holografika’s technique consists in projecting several different angular views of an object on the screen that can be perceived by the viewer just slightly moving on his left or right, as we would do in a real life object exploration.

Now if you try to watch the upper or lower sides of this virtual object, you will get always the same view of it, as in fact the system is not able to perform vertical parallax, giving back a sensation of fakeness.

A new kind of display has been invented by Holovision that can create high-resolution, three-dimensional moving images that can be viewed with full parallax by people in different locations without special eyewear.

Holovision volumetric display based on MEMS.

This display leverages on the future features brought by MEMS (Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems) that in the next years will be used to create a matrix of moving display elements to guide light at the level of individual display elements (such as voxels). MEMS will be able to spin light at individual voxel level in all directions, thus dynamically recreating a volumetric image.

Array of spinning microlenses at voxel (volumetric pixel) level

Such a revolutionary volumetric display system will have also consequences in terms of all the data that has to be elaborated and transmitted, requiring graphics processing units and transmission channel capabilities to perform several times more than today.

I’m fascinated by gestural interfaces. About an year ago I bumped into one that was developed and demonstrated by the Hasso Plattner Institut in Berlin, a research institution created in 1998 by professor Hasso Plattner, co-founder of the well-known software company SAP.

Here the idea was to develop an interface for a device which does not have a screen nor a keyboard. This interface has been called “imaginary interface”. Using video analysis the system detects the user’s hand silhouettes from a small camera hanging from the neck. One hand, that has to show an L using thumb and forefinger, is used as a reference both for the person who is sketching something in the air, and for the system that sets this hand as the origin of a “virtual whiteboard”.

The other hand is used to actually draw on this “whiteboard” and the resulting drawing is transferred via cellphone to a remote PC. When you want to use the virtual ink on the whiteboard, you have to connect your thumb and forefinger in a circle.

Have a look to the video that shows how simple this can be.

This imaginary interface will let us sending some indications to a friend, taking a short note, sketching a memo just using our free hands…

Many EU funded RT&D initiatives on future networks are sharing the vision that, in about five-ten years, networks will become so ubiquitous as to seem swarms of lightweight, highly interconnected nodes. These nodes, interacting in multi-domain environments, will be able to abstract not only the traditional communications, processing and storage resources but eventually also services, applications and the associated pieces of data. If this vision will be turned into reality, then future networks will look like large scale complex systems, implying this the existence of multiple phases in their dynamics: i.e. identical local dynamic can give rise to widely different global dynamics. This level of complexity will make networks design and control highly challenging.

I’ve just read this paper “Controllability of complex networks” (by Yang-Yu Liu, Jean-Jacques Slotine, & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi) describing an analytical approach for controlling of an arbitrary complex directed network by identifying the set of driver nodes with time-dependent control, that can guide the system’s entire dynamics. In particular, they have argued that sparse inhomogeneous networks, which are typical of many real complex systems, are the most difficult to control, but that dense and homogeneous networks can be controlled using a few driver nodes. They have claimed also that minimum number of driver nodes needed to maintain full control of the network is determined by the ‘maximum matching’ in the network, that is, the maximum set of links that do not share start or end nodes. These seems to be very interesting results on the controllability of complex networks, with implications in several branches of engineering (from communications, to biology, from robotics to business ecosystems).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nature10011.html

Got problem in remembering your password? Not sure it is really secure?

Iris scan

Rest easy. Now a US company, Hoyos Group, is offering an iris scan that you can use to allow access to your computer and even to single files.

It is called EyeLock and it looks like a flash pen with a camera, they call it a wand…, and you can use it to scan your iris. This creates a unique code that is matched with the one in the computer (or associated to the file). The system regenerate the code each time so that even if somebody hacks into the computer or file and retrieve the previous code this is of no use.

It is what we have got used with James Bond movies but unlike some movies it works only with a live iris. No risk to have your eye being “stolen”!.

Although a number of iris scan have been available this is, to my knowledge, the first one targeting the mass market. And the pricing is consistent with the mass market: 99$ US.

I bet that a solution based on biometrics is going to win in the future. I cannot imagine to have to type in (and more than that to remember) tens of passwords through my day.