This week was Show and Tell week at the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum for Intel’s labs. In an annual tradition, Intel trots out stuff we likely won’t see for a decade or more. This time it didn’t disappoint with fully articulated robots, holodeck cars, reactive broadcast power, and tons of augmented reality applications.

Augmented Reality

This is actually rather close to market, but I still found the collection of products rather interesting.  For those that are traveling, the ability to look at any building and snap a picture to find the name, history, and importance of any object from a real time or cached web feed, is amazing. Given we have just had an earthquake and the demonstration location was San Francisco it could be really handy to know the background of the building that was about to crush you.

Another application allows a user to video stream back what you were seeing and someone remote or even an application could walk you through what you needed to do at that location. I blew a hose off my car this week and something like this could have showcased what I needed to do to fix it. I still would have taken it to the dealer because I don’t do that anymore. However, I would have liked to know more about what they were going through on my behalf.

HERB:  The Home Exploring Butler

This name came off as kind of creepy and the robot looked like something that would be in a movie where the folks should have left the house when they first saw it. I’m thinking the line you wouldn’t want to hear is “Peek-a-Boo I found you now I get your arm”. In any case, this robot with a Segway base transport had two articulated arms and hands and could fetch and hand you stuff.  Really handy for the physically challenged, really drunk people, or that occasional 4 year old who can’t get to the cookies on the top of the refrigerator. HERB is a scary looking thing that could likely be used to greet the Mormons, who occasionally drop in to chat. Or it could be great on Halloween as well.

The Human Brain User Interface

I’m guessing that this came about because the movie Forbidden Planet came out in 1954 and folks don’t remember what was killing everyone. Hint: It was the brain interface. However, the idea of just being able to link with a computer remains very interesting and brings us to the concept of Singularity much more quickly. This was done with Carnegie Melon University and might actually redefine the human race in its ultimate form. How’s that for potential impact? I’ll bet they are thinking AMD can’t top that.  I’ll bet AMD is thinking Mars would be a nice place to move if this goes much farther. (By way of disclosure, Forbidden Planet is one of my favorite movies).

The Meeting Diarist

Otherwise known as “the persistent secretary with no morals or sex appeal” this concept captures everything that it can hear and then indexes it so you can jump to the parts that are interesting.  Tried to see this work, but the table appeared to be swarmed by folks who had NSA badges. I figured the space program must be in real trouble if they had to save money by cutting the extra “A” from NASA but also figured the astronauts could use all the help they can get. Could be really handy in meetings. Could be really painful for parents who make promises they then forget about it.

Personal Vacation Assistant

Have you ever been on a vacation and didn’t know what to do with your time?  Lord knows none of us has a desire to just kick back and pretend we are in a Corona commercial and would rather fill our time rushing around to place after place just like we do at work from meeting to meeting. Intel can help.  This application factors in what you like and tells you where to go, nicely.  It will point out places you might enjoy by using your smartphone, GPS system, and network access. It can even map you to that location. But be aware, if your wife uses your phone and the only thing that comes up is Strip Clubs, you’ll have some explaining to do.

Intelligent Energy Management of Electric Vehicles

So let’s see. We all will buy electric cars, we all drive home about the same time, we all plug them in during the same window, and we sit back and watch the area’s electric system short out due to excess load as our meters spin. That is the outcome Intel is trying to prevent by creating an application which manages the load the charging electric cars put on the power grid to both ensure they charge during low use times (like the middle of the night) when there is excess power to avoid frying the power grid.   There is the added benefit that they may also charge the batteries intelligently so you don’t have to replace the near $20K battery packs prematurely.

The Connected Car

Because we think it is such a great idea to be able to do email and other PC things from your dash, we give you the connected car and one more reason to work from home and never actually get on a freeway. Probably best for non-video streaming entertainment and automatic audio reading of email and voicemail management, this still sounds better for passengers than for drivers.   However, done right, it could significantly enhance the driving experience. Done wrong, it could cause us to meet new people in ways we never imagined, at speed, head on, and very memorably.

Blending My Worlds on Any Device

Remember all those folks who were supposed to be watching the banks and keeping our money safe and instead were watching porn?  Well, this is a solution for them as this creates a split environment and one that is virtually separated to prevent data transference between two environments. One side would allow access to personal resources like Second Life and Facebook, while the other would be for corporate tasks. This would eliminate most of the social network based viruses from infecting the company, still allow people to use these external services, and it wouldn’t be tracked by IT taking them out of the HR enforcement loop for things like, well, you know what.

Genevieve Bell, Ethnologist

This is the only female Intel Fellow and the only Ethnologist with the power to actually make a difference anyplace in the tech industry.   She is the one mostly responsible for making sure the outcomes from all of these efforts are actually beneficial and don’t land us or Intel someplace we really don’t want to go.

She has been given her own lab and the end result could easily be an industry shift from being technology focused to being human race focused – potentially stopping the trend that is making us slaves to our technology and, at the very least, helping us to partner with and master it. This was Genevieve’s coming out party and given the number of horror movie plots I got out of this year’s Intel labs event, I’m really hoping she will be successful.

Independence Day

This weekend we celebrate Independence Day. The independence I’m looking forward to is not having to manage an increasing number of uncooperative devices. At Intel’s event, the biggest part was the last because their Ethnologist Fellow is missioned to ensure that what comes out of Intel benefits us as a species going forward at an increasing rate. This is not only important to me personally, but to the world in general, because I really don’t want to be technology’s slave anymore.

Oh, I almost forgot, the Holodeck car. This projected an image on a car-shaped surface and allowed designers or scientists to change things virtually and see the results in 3D.  Not only is it handy for folks doing things like virtual wind tunnel analysis, but you could see what that girl you always wanted to date, but never had the nerve to ask, might have looked like in the passenger seat of your car. Expect a lot of bogus Facebook pictures and some really angry women.

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