The Evolution Of A Mobile Phone

I have installed the best upgrade to my brain this year. It is called eComm 2011, and was released last week in San Francisco. It was a continuous and very broad stream of innovative ideas, many of them I will be recalling here on future occasions. And myself I was lucky to be on the stage too, so let me fulfill my duty and add some comments.

First two shortcuts: the link to my slides and the excellent follow-up article by Chris Jablonski. After you read Chris' piece, you should have a very good grasp on what the device will be, will look like and how we will be using it, so I will not repeat this. But let me add a few words explaining "why?".

There are a number of issues, or even fundamental inconveniences with current mobile phones, which by the way should be considered as mobile personal computers, or personal teleputers (PTs).

The first and obvious problem is the physical size. We want to carry the devices with us, so naturally we want them as small, thin and light, as possible. And this is in direct conflict with the way we interact with them. We cannot consume information coming from a 4 inch display at a high rate. It is just too small to read and already too big to carry in a pocket. Ditto keyboard, even the best hardware one. Swype thumb typing is way slower than touch typing on a regular QWERTY keyboard. Today the screen and the keyboard of a phone are the bandwidth bottleneck. Not the radio link. Time to find a radically different solution.

What we would love to have is a screen, that is small and light, but can also be big on demand, when needed. The only design, where the physical hardware is small, yet allowing for a big picture is a projector. We could be wearing classic projectors, as Pranav Mistry demonstrated at his fascinating TED talk. But with a simple trick the projected image could be thrown directly on our eyes, when a projection engine is integrated in a wearable display. The nice thing about using lasers as a source of light in pico projectors, is the projected image is partially reflected by otherwise transparent glass, which can be used to form a wearable HUD, or heads up display. This way, by turning the projector on and off, one could move back and forth between virtual and real life, but probably the most common mode would be to render only relevant content either on the side of the field of view, or subtly augmenting the reality. Of course there would be moments when the projected image is fully off or fully on.

And then comes the question of navigating the computer integrated into the wearable display. While control by mind would play the primary role (finally we would be really hands - free), you could imagine a compilation of sensors. Mind signals (which in today consumer - grade products, like the NIA, are still a little difficult to filter error-free), could be enhanced by tiny eye-tracking cameras, in a fashion similar to what the Tobii Glasses already do. But on the other hand Germans are already driving their cars hands free, using Emotiv EPOC, the prosumer grade headband.

Finally speaking of use cases, there will be thousands of them. But one seems to me more important than the rest. One I can refer to quoting a statement by Kelly Fitzsimmons. She said "We have outsourced our brains to Google". Which may sound true, but is not. Google is not a brain. It is a quick content based lookup to other people's brains (after all somebody has written all those pages...). So a form of CAM, or Content Addressable Memory. When our brains will be electronically telecoupled, Google will be not just a memory. It will be an active router connecting on demand live human brains, based on the kind of activity they want to do together.