Machines getting smarter all the time
By Frank Bajak
Associated Press
SAN DIEGO — How strange. The price of sodas in that amusement park vending machine rises with the temperature. In the blazing midday sun, they cost double what the machine demands on a cool cloudy evening.
While such radio-controlled price manipulation may just be hypothetical, the technology isn't.
As wireless data networks spread the Internet, previously dumb machines are being connected and endowed with intelligence while portable communications devices are getting smarter.
Proponents haven't yet agreed on an adjective for the dawning new era in computing: Pervasive. Ubiquitous. Continuous. Persistent.
It's a piece down the road, this unwired world. Three to five years is the consensus among industry analysts. The telecom meltdown still acts as a ball-and-chain on new investment.
But there's no shortage of good ideas percolating — the soda machine scenario was one, posited by an IBM executive.
Industry insiders and invited journalists sampled some of the ideas at IDG's fourth DEMOmobile show in San Diego recently, getting a gander at prototypes and finished products.
Among the inventions:
Communicator "badge". The Vocera Communications System, which bundles the functionality of a walkie-talkie, phone and pager into a 1.6-ounce "badge" that users wear around their necks and operate hands-free with voice commands, is designed for hospitals, retail stores, assembly lines — anywhere mobile workers need steady contact.
Vocera's clever software uses voice recognition and transmits conversations in data packets using WiFi, the increasingly popular short-range wireless standard.
Virtual keyboard. Operating on the premise that people only want to carry around a single, lightweight device that keeps them connected, Canesta Inc. has invented a keyboard made only of light.
A projector beams an image of a keyboard onto any flat surface, and 3D sensors register when a user's fingertip touches an individual key. The 40-employee San Jose company says it has already licensed the technology to three manufacturers it would not name. And it has just opened a Tokyo office.
Digital pen. Logitech has licensed technology from Anoto, a Swedish company, for an ink pen with an embedded digital camera that "remembers" handwriting and, when cradled and synchronized with a PC, can transfer those pen strokes into a digital file.
You can make a sketch or take notes on paper and save yourself the trouble of transcribing those ideas into a format that can be entered into a computer for transmission elsewhere.
The Logitech io Pen — I/O is computerese for input/output — only works when writing on special paper that's embedded with an invisible microgrid of tiny dots arranged like graph paper. It's the grid that allows the Pen to remember its strokes.
Digital penmanship. Handwriting being what it is, an often awkward collection of barely legible scribbles, good software tools will be integral to the success of such devices as tablet computers.
Until computers handle voice recognition well enough to permit people to simply speak to machines, proponents of tablet computers believe handwriting is the ticket. Forget the keyboard.
But how to sharpen up skewed lines and sloping penmanship so a finished document saved on a computer has smooth diagrams and clearly readable text?
The Pen&Internet division of Parascript, whose technology is used by the U.S. Postal Service to read handwritten envelopes, believes it's got just the thing.
Called Advanced Note Recognition, the technology separates handwritten text from drawings and smoothes out rough edges. The company expects a finished product in early 2003.
