Here at the Future Centre, a part of my research consists in investigating how the world of applications is changing our use of the cell phone and how we daily interact with people and things through network. Smartphones indeed are used – not yet in a massive way, but it’s a matter of time – as payment devices, dedicated gaming platforms, touristic guides, means to make e-commerce in mobility, remote controls to manage our domestic devices. In other words they are going to take the role of converged service-oriented devices.

That’s why I’m always very careful to experiments like the one I want to talk today. A group of researchers at the University of Queensland, in partnership with Volunteering Qld, is developing an app (expected to be ready within the end of 2011) to help people survive natural disasters.

According to Anthony Frangi, who leads the project funded through the Natural Disaster Resilience Program: “While radio and television is a traditional method for getting information out to people about emergency situations, young people aged under 25 do not listen to radio extensively and so are at risk of not being informed if an emergency situation develops.”. And, he adds, “Using existing mobile phone technology we hope to incorporate the ability to inform emergency services, family and friends where the person is located using GPS technology and allow them to also keep track of family and friends around them.”

This is not the first app that invites smartphone owners to become “first-aid volunteers” in cases of natural disasters or just giving concrete help in emergency situations, I recall that early last summer iPhone users who found oiled animals in the Gulf Coast area could take a picture of the animal and send it to animal rescue organizations using a free app developed by a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Track Your Happiness is a scientific research project that aims to understand which factors affect people’s happiness in their daily lives to achieve a scientific understanding of happiness and to correlate the mind-wandering with the depression phenomena. It seems, in fact, that a very common habit as daydreaming is not good for our mental health, even if there are psychologists who say that it’s difficult to make causal claims about this link.

Anyway, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University conducted their experiment using an iPhone app – not a native app, but a web one with still some layout and interaction problems according to me – needful to track the moods of about 2000 people three (or more if you want) times a day, entering on people’s lives on a regular basis, something unthinkable for traditional psychology methods.

According to Jonathan Smallwood, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “This is a really solid piece of work, mind-wandering and levels of happiness have been linked in laboratory studies, but never before in such a large population of people going about their daily lives.”

So, every day, the app asks users to say what they are feeling and the activities they are conducting, and prompts them to give feedbacks whether their mind is wandering or they are focusing on their temporary commitment.

What really interests me is not going into the research content, which can be deepened in several further lectures, but emphasizing that apps are the best tools we have now to reach the end users at any time, to the point of being used in sensitive scientific experiments as this one conducted at Harvard. I’m therefore convinced that future research will use more and more application users as statistical samples, achieving results previously thought to be difficult to obtain.

By the way, I started recording my happiness on my iPhone throughout the day and my happiness report progress is just at its beginning (14%), but all these notifications are getting me a little bit nervous!

Yesterday I talked about the future of telepresence, especially in dealing with holograms in terms of telecommunications. But the industry that seems to force in speeding up the holographic techniques to make them the new frontier of the entertainment is the music industry.

Hatsune Miku, as a matter of fact, is the rising star of the Japanese music scene and her last concert sold out in Japan, but her body is not real and her voice is entirely synthetic (it comes from a vocal synthesizer made by Yamaha which can closely reproduce a real person’s voice)!

This holographic singer is not a true hologram since light just makes up a planar surface and not a volumetric space. However, what I find interesting is not so much the technology used, but how people interact with it. And the result is that Hatsune Miku has so far gathered a large group of rabid fans who are literally crazy for her, she has released her first album, and her last concert in Japan was simply sold out. Check the video to believe it.

Certainly part of this triumph is due to the singer’s anime appearance, and I’m not so confident this pop star will hit the same success in the West. Even if I read that concerts in San Francisco and New York have already been scheduled and I could be wrong! Anyhow, regardless of becoming a Hatsune Miku supporter or not, what fascinates me is the idea that such holograms could act as interfaces in our daily lives and I’m right now thinking many applications where they would be really useful!

When I think of the holograms, my mind goes straight back to the first movie of Star Wars when Luke Skywalker is watching a short clip of the holographic help message stored in the droid R2-D2 by Princess Leia. It was 1977, I was not born yet, and 13 years had passed since Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks showed off the world’s first 3D hologram during a conference of the Optical Society of America.

Today, after many years, a hologram that can move in real time is still a goal that researchers are trying to achieve. But it seems that something is moving and that the possibility of taking objects from one place (not yet a galaxy far far away!) and showing them in another location in three dimensions is going to be brought out of Geroge Lucas’ fiction creation. Right now, in fact, scientists are working on the photorefractive material – it’s a complex new plastic material that changes its refractive index when illuminated by laser light – that can handle near-real-time motion. From what I read in a recent article, a group of researchers led by Nasser Peyghambarian, at the University of Arizona, has developed a holographic system capable, through the plastic material I mentioned, to record and display a different holographic image (not yet detailed) every 2 seconds.

In a nutshell, the system captures 3D information by filming an object from 16 different viewpoints, and for every viewpoint there is a camera which takes an image of the object. Then the views are processed into an array of hogels (holographic pixels) and two pulsed laser beams write the data into the rewritable recording material which is made by a combination of plastic polymers.

However, it seems that commercial applications in the telecommunications field are about seven to ten years away, since larger images, better color and resolution as well as a faster frame rate (fps) are needed. Actually the prototype, which is quite small and improvable also in terms of energy consumption, can handle color, but only by writing separate red, green and blue holograms at different angles.

In short, there’s still a long road ahead before having something similar to the Star Wars-style interplanetary communications, but it will be the future of telepresence. Conversely, it should be easy in theory to record holographic movies, so they can be played back later, and the researchers are actually working to speed up the refresh rate to reach the 30 fps needed for movies.

I wonder at this point how we’ll sit in the cinema when it is possible to walk around an image…

To be more clear about what I meant in my previous post, I want to show you a free application recently developed by Zoliotech Pte Ltd, a company that develops mobile and web applications for businesses in Singapore. Through this app you can order your favorite pasta dish or pizza from Pastamania, the largest Italian restaurant chain in the city-state, and have it delivered to your home or your office as well. Additionally the app allows you to see which outlet will handle your order and how long they will take to deliver it, and just with a few clicks to finalize the purchase. And as we all know, to minimize the number of actions is crucial in keeping shoppers engaged.

One of the activities to which we are paying daily attention within the Marco Polo 2.0 project is precisely the study of what’s new in the application stores, the search for trends that applications are following, and the development of APIs that allow developer communities to interact with the territory. Because we bet that the future of m-commerce lies in the native apps.

In other words, what we aim is to let developers all around the world to use their imagination to think about a new way to let people interact with a specific territory. So our team is constantly working on providing guidelines to use the Marco Polo 2.0 APIs with the objective of helping developers in creating highly monetizable apps that enable interactions to take place.

We have at now implemented dozens of APIs and every day, working close with partner companies and developers, we improve them and create new ones to offer services that are real business opportunities both for the developers and for the affiliated companies, and which are attractive and useful to the final user.

It’s a win-win situation where companies have innovation and a worldwide market at nearly no cost, developers are paid directly by the companies according to a revenue sharing model, and costumers interact with a territory and its products through personalized and innovative services that transform a simple purchase into an experience.

I recently read an article that began by saying that the mobile commerce revolution is underway and that retailers must act to seize this opportunity. I’m pretty sure about that. Just as online shopping attracted long ago consumers to the Web, now the mobile revolution is providing a convenient shopping channel that boasts the ultimate in directness, attractiveness and ease-of-use. It’s expected, in fact, that mobile commerce sales will grow to US $2.42 billion within this year – think that e-commerce is a 130 billion dollar industry in the USA – a number that hides a high potential considering that 62 percent of retailers have either not yet planned a mobile strategy or are just in the early stages, probably due to a perceived lack of ROI in launching a mobile campaign.

In Italy, e-commerce has always struggled to assert itself, both for legislative issues and for problems related to the broadband and the cost of the service. However today it’s possible to implement an e-commerce service at a very low cost, and that’s surely one of the reasons why its penetration is now recording a double-digit growth rate in all sectors. The leisure industry remains the most consolidated and the one with the highest rate of growth, about 70%, and together with the tourism sector they reach the 80% of the overall business, something amounting to EUR 8 billion.

And what about the m-commerce in the first EU country by number of smartphone users and where there are approximately 10 million surfers who access the Internet via mobile devices (29 percent more than in 2009)? It seems, as a matter of fact, that the main obstacle to m-commerce initiatives is lacking of infrastructure, partners, budget and skills besides the problems related to consumers’ privacy and safety.

According to a recent survey by Casaleggio Associati and Barclays, 14% of the companies that make e-commerce in Italy is already implementing a mobile strategy and 35% is planning to invest in the late 2010 and 2011 to increase sales and customer loyalty.

Moreover, 17% of those companies that make e-commerce has created an application for smartphones. 12% thinks to do so in the next 6 months, 27% within one year and 24% in two years. The remaining 37% does not even think of using applications in the m-commerce strategy.

Difficult to say whether the next future of mobile commerce lies in the mobile web or in the applications, since most of time native apps give what a browsing approach lacks and vice versa. On the one hand, for example, I believe that apps can better offer a tailored shopping experience and all those compelling features which can catch shoppers within a mobility context. On the other hand, I’m concerned that application development costs are prohibitive for many SMEs, and, as often happens with the technologies that are in their infancy, apps still have a niche reach that could not justify the investment.

I think it’s not so easy to surprise me, but I admit that this time something did it. A group of scientists that works on smart fabrics incorporating nanotechnology have invented the Spray-on Fabric, something I believe will revolutionize the concept of clothing and fashion.

This technology consists of short fibers combined with polymers, which are dissolved into a solvent to allow them to be sprayed from an aerosol can, in order to create form-fitting clothes. The cold spray dries instantly on impact with skin and after a few minutes the resulting fabric can be removed as a normal cloth and washed with the rest of the laundry. The spray procedure may be done several times to obtain more layers depending on the desired thickness, and if you don’t like the texture or the color, never mind, simply dissolve it in the same solvent and start over! I’d be concerned about the solvent used and any allergic reactions that have been found, but I’ve not found any information about these topics yet.

Here you can see the spray in action:

Consider the potential of such a technology which properties can be tailored to meet customer’s needs in creating personal clothing styles, with the desired feel – wool, linen or acrylic fibers depending on the texture you want to give to the fabric – due to the disposable philosophy that prevails in modern society. And what about the chance to have a thousand clothes in one? There’s a party that requires a tie, it’s cold and you’re without gloves, you’re in the pool and you realize you’ve forgotten your swimsuit, you twist your ankle or your knee and you’d need a functional bandage. You have the spray, it’s all right! Moreover, it seems the team is already working on a sanitary spray-on bandage system to deliver first aid in the case of wounds or to soothe burnt skin.

The ultimate goal could be to embed sensors in the form-fitting clothes during the manufacturing process, so it’s possible to choose each time the chip type, and the garment in which to place it. Think of all the information you could gather on the lifestyle of people, on their habits, and especially consider how it would be easy to measure those vital parameters useful for monitoring people’s health. Today when we think about a product, we have to think about all the services that could be developed on it… And clothes are things, that will more and more belong to the Internet, and less to us!

“Hello Mattia, it’s 7.15 am and you still have to wash up and brush your teeth. Hey, you look a bit nervous… is it for your job interview? Don’t worry, you’re a smart guy! Rather, I suggest you to dress appropriately: be simple, yet elegant. And, please, don’t wear that gaudy tie you usually use. It’s so terrible!”

Who’s speaking is not my conscience, but my bathroom mirror. Imagine a mirror that can sense your mood and that is able, thanks to a sophisticated AI system, to interact with you and give you suggestions. Don’t you wish your mirror knew you a little more intimately? This vision of the future is already taking the first steps and is telling us about intelligent domestic mirrors that will reflect not only our physical appearance, but our feelings as well.

A graduate student within the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program is working on a pulse-monitoring system that could theoretically measure several vital signs such as pulse, respiration, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure just by having a person in front of it.

In the following video a MIT Media Lab student shows the prototype, a mirror with a built-in low-cost camera, while it’s displaying the pulse rate in real-time.

The idea to detect health information using a camera is not new, but what appears to be extremely innovative is the combination of some features: a smart processing method used, the fact they identify a fixed region on the face and track it, and basically the possibility to use a low-cost camera equipment. According to what I read on the MIT News Office, the system is able to detect small variations in brightness produced by face’s blood vessels, and tests have confirmed encouraging results. The major challenge faced by the project was regarding the subject’s movements and variations in the ambient lighting. To solve this problem it’s been used the Independent Component Analysis applied to images. So signal-processing techniques originally developed to extract a single voice from a noisy background have been suitably adapted in order to extract the pulse signal from other kind of variations.

Last month I read that Intel is developing context-aware computing platforms which will enable devices to understand how we feel, what we’re up to, letting them know thereby what to do to help us. As expected, the Intel’s system will be firstly tested on the smartphone, a device that in the third quarter of this year marked an increase of 78% compared to the same period in 2009! Just think how much personal information could be collected and figured out combining our use of apps with data from sources such as the geo-location service, the gyroscope, the camera, and so on.

Well, maybe I’m ahead of the curve, but I already see the “Intel Inside” logo on my bathroom mirror!

Right one year ago, the Volkswagen Group launched a delightful initiative called “The Fun Theory”. Basically, this experiment started from the assumption that the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better is by making it fun to do, and according to the facts it’s proved to be so. Before making some considerations, watch the following video:

First of all, what is an interface? As an information engineer, I always thought of the GUI, the human-machine interface involving primarily the sense of sight. But we have just seen an example of an interface that involves practically just the sound. People, in fact, were encouraged to use the trash can because attracted by that funny noise, a sound similar to that used in cartoons when something falls from tens of meters. So, at the end, it seems that a particular sound, as a mean of communication, can become more effective than every other sign language.

Secondly, I believe that research often loses sight of its main objective, to be functional compared to the real problems people have. That’s why I consider such a technology so brilliant, because it’s an example of a trivial technology that fulfills a role as noble as that of sensitizing people about civic issues. Perhaps we should more often remember that we already have a lot of on-the-shelf technology, and it’s enough to “connect the dots”, as Steve Jobs says, to solve many problems that hinder our daily life.

Third and final consideration, but not least, this initiative has been sponsored by Volkswagen. Maybe something got to do with the collection of the waste in public green spaces? No, of course. If we look at the number of users who saw the video on Youtube soon it becomes clear why they posted that video and others. Advertising. 2736205 visits while I’m watching… The German carmaker appears to have hit the bullseye, don’t you think? Again, we could make some considerations about the type of advertising. Starting from the assumption that fun helps in the decision making process, then it could be a reasonable inference that watching a funny video and associating it with the Volkswagen logo, next time you are undecided between a VW Golf and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, you choose the German car!

Especially since application stores exist, mobile phones are more and more assuming the role of supporting customers’ daily activities. For this reason, every player who works in the ICT sector must address the challenge of how to provide handsets that better fit customers’ individual needs, and work on personalization of services and user interfaces. Therefore it should not be surprising that the mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo has developed a tiny phone-size glasses-free 3D screen with touch feedback. The prototype is a 2.57-inch LCD display that uses lenticular lenses, with eight viewing angles spaced on every 20 degrees starting from the center. When you hold a magnetic stylus close to the screen, the haptic feedback gives you the feeling of being touched, simulating a physical interaction with the scene. The following video showcases the device in action:

The Japanese mobile provider has not yet determined when to commercialize such a technology and they are just “developing the technology as one of several candidates for a communication technology that uses richer contents”, still in the phase of examining possible applications. Surely one of the possible developments will cover the mobile gaming, and you can bet it will be a great hit in Japan. I’m not so confident it will happen the same in other countries, especially here… Think about the significantly lower penetration in Italy of video calls or the Tamagotchi story (a real success in Japan) to be convinced of this. Anyhow, it’s another out-of-the-box look into the future of mobility!