The Mobile Home of the 21st Century

Origin: Redherring.com
Source: Lee Bruno
Date: October 30, 2002

R&D teams at many of the world's major tech organizations are developing new ways for humans to interact with their digital environment.

Wireless data and voice networks are popping up everywhere. Like the stems of proliferating weeds, their antennae can be found now in the darndest of places: inside local Starbucks coffee shops, as well as on residential rooftops in cities like New York and San Francisco, where empty Pringles cans broadcast Internet data throughout local neighborhoods.

The devices that use these antennae are proliferating as well--and morphing: the cell phone and handheld computer, for example, are merging into a single device for both data and voice. And the new Tablet PC, based on Microsoft technology, is designed to incorporate wireless features, making it yet another platform for computing on the go.

What hasn't been so obvious is that our living environment is also in the process of being transformed. Not only are homes, offices, and public meeting places being connected wirelessly to the Internet, but soon they will also be retrofitted with digital sensors. It's as if cell phones and handheld devices will provide an extended digital awareness designed to help answer the next question or navigate the next obstacle.

Recognizing these changes, some companies have begun to study the interactions of people and technology. For instance, researchers at a high-tech campus of the consumer-electronics giant Philips Electronics, in the Netherlands, have built a two-story, 200-square-meter house in which scientists have hidden 34 cameras and 24 microphones to record how people interact with new technology. Philips calls this wiring of living and working environments "ambient intelligence." The company believes that distributed computing is coming to the consumer, and that these inexpensive computing components will become common in every house. Meanwhile, Microsoft, through its EasyLiving project, is studying how computers can signal people, and people can signal computers as they move through "intelligent" rooms that turn on media players and adjust thermostats. Several prominent universities are working on similar projects: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with its Living Lab, and the Georgia Institute of Technology with its Aware Home Research Initiative.

At Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, engineers have outfitted rooms with beacons that broadcast URLs to handheld devices. The signals, sent over wireless networks, target people passing through the digitally-equipped area and are intended to help them locate information and services. Cooltown, as HP calls this "location-aware" system, is part of the company's nomadic computing research, which focuses on how to tie Web resources to physical objects and places.

Even without the new applications these projects are likely to yield, the home has become a digital data mine, according to Gene Becker, an engineer working in the lab. He says that with all the PCs, digital video devices, MP3 players, and other electronic gadgets, there's roughly half a terabyte of data in a typical household. HP is planning to add its Cooltown technology to appliances and devices like printers and radios by incorporating wireless connectivity and software. In effect, HP is extending Web infrastructure that's already in place so it can support consumers, the so-called nomadic computer users.

Linking solid buildings to mobile handheld computing devices, however, requires significant innovation. Some of the more notable advances are in areas like smart antennae, power sources, and processors.

Newer, smarter antenna technologies are helping network devices reduce signal interference and the number of dropped calls. Established players like Ericsson, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, and Nokia, as well as startups like ArrayComm, are working on multiple types of antennae. "Multiple antenna technologies are critical to the future of these convergent devices," says Werner Sievers, CEO of Zyray Wireless, a maker of chip sets for wireless devices. "A year ago, it was very difficult to incorporate multiple antennae into a standard handset," he says. "Now laptops are shipping with multiple antennae to ensure they can talk to the next generation of wireless networks being readied for the market."

With brighter displays and faster communications functions, these devices are sure to require newer sources of power. To this end, Motorola, MTI MicroFuel Cells, NEC, and PolyFuel are developing micro fuel cells. And the startup Qynergyor is working on a long-lasting portable energy device that will power microelectromechanical machines.

For handhelds, Motorola has been developing a methanol micro fuel cell capable of generating 1 watt of power. (A BlackBerry messaging device has a 2-watt transmitter that runs on one AA battery.) The company expects to market it by 2005. These fuel cells, however, are likely to cost hundreds of dollars, much more than traditional batteries. "It is difficult to compete directly with battery technology," says Jerry Hallmark, a manager of energy technology labs at Motorola. He says the first version will likely be a charging appliance for handhelds that use batteries, especially for field people using high-bandwidth applications that require more power.

To make the mighty applications hum in their tiny devices, the latest class of smaller, cheaper, and more powerful chips now deliver processing power that rivals desktop computers just a few years old. Already, the first next-generation phones are equipped with CPUs comprising 100 million transistors. That evolutionary path of processing power has been predictable and fairly obvious. The next phase of wiring our physical environment will not be so easy to predict.