Don't know about you, but my home theater rack and PC desk are a rat's nest of cabling that include joysticks, keyboards, mice, speakers, Ethernet, phone cords, USB, Firewire, and a variety of power strips, with a plethora of power cables (many of which have their own transformers and different plug sizes) all tangled with one another.

I've always dreamed of a wireless world where you simply put the device where you want it and it just works. There have been some good steps in that direction with the advent of wireless peripherals, and I'm looking forward to high-bandwidth wireless technologies that will allow the equivalent of wireless video/audio connections such as HDMI. But until recently, it didn't appear there was a viable solution for wireless electricity to power those devices.

The New York Times recently reported that Intel engineers have demonstrated a prototype wireless power solution that may eventually deliver on the dream. To quote:

On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.

“Something like this technology could be embedded in tables and work surfaces,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, “so as soon as you put down an appropriately equipped device it would immediately begin drawing power.”

60 watts may not seem like a lot, especially to power-hungry desktop PC users, but it's plenty to recharge the battery in a laptop, mobile phone, game controller, keyboard, mouse, speaker, etc. Imagine a world where your device is always fully-charged simply by virtue of your having been sitting and working at a continual power tap! I suspect this could even work with more power-hungry devices (such as a desktop PC or home theater equipment such as an amp) with attached battery storage. Not as elegant, but who knows? Perhaps they'll be able to advance the technology so it can support these heavy-load devices?

Just to be clear, this was a tech demo at Intel's IDF (Intel Development Forum) event, and is certainly nowhere near a shipping product yet. However, Intel never shows off anything without reason, and I certainly wish them well in trying to deliver a cost-effective, safe solution for the home and office.

Been watching this with a great deal of interest, and wanted to pass along a good article in case you weren't aware of the ramifications of this auction. Simply put, one of the last wide-ranging/penetrating wireless spectrum chunks is coming up for auction. The plans of the eventual winner will have a huge impact on how (and whether) we can expect to see a useful nationwide broadband network anytime soon here in the US.

Why are all these companies so excited? Because the 60 MHz of spectrum that’s about to be auctioned is the last prime real estate for mobile communications that will be available in the U.S. for decades to come. And it lies in the 700-MHz band substantially below the 800- to 850-MHz and 1900-MHz frequencies already used for U.S. mobile phones. In this case lower is better since 700-MHz signals propagate better, spreading farther and penetrating buildings more easily than higher frequencies. This greater range means that each 700-MHz cellular antenna can service a larger footprint, which means fewer cells (those interlocking service areas that a “cellular” network is made up of) will be required overall. That should, theoretically, make it cheaper—$5 billion cheaper according to some estimates—to build a national wireless network.

Have had the iPhone for just under a week now, and wanted to share some more thoughts.

Overall, I am absolutely in love with this device. It feels fantastic in the hand, the screen is drop-dead gorgeous to look at, and in general it "just works" as you'd expect. In particular, the touchscreen UI is just as responsive, intuitive, and accessible as all of Apple's promotional videos show.

Pause and internalize that for a moment.

Everyone I've shown this phone to wants one - no exceptions. The only thing that is keeping a few folks I know from getting one today is a lack of Exchange support. You can work around some of this by syncing your phone to a PC with Outlook on it; that'll sync your contacts and calendar to the phone (though obviously you don't get push email or the ability to create contacts on the road). Yes, I've seen the same rumors as you about Apple licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync technology. I don't know if it's true (nor would I be able to say if I did know), but I can say that most of the fencesitters I've met are waiting for some sort of Exchange support and they'll jump as soon as it might be available.

Some other thoughts in no particular order:

The Good:

• iPod support is great - I was even able to import WMA Lossless songs from my music archive into iTunes for Windows. It simply transcoded the music to 256 Kb AAC (the higher setting I chose) and it just worked. I could even add album art to the music that was missing it.
• UI is coherent and extremely well-integrated together. Everytime you have a "I want to mail my picture" sort of thought there's a button just waiting for you right there.
• Camera is surprisingly good quality, though simple (more on the simplicity below). It takes easily the best "camera phone" pictures I've seen, and I've been using it to flesh out the contact photos in my Outlook address book.
• Virtual touch keyboard works fine. The larger screen makes the buttons a bit bigger than they might have been otherwise, and the predictive text technology is quite good - even with my fat, pudgy fingers.
• WiFi is beautifully integrated. Sitting in an open hotspot? No problem - the phone sees the signal, and asks you (once) if you'd like to use it. From then on, it'll automatically switch to that SSID anytime you're in the area without bugging you. I wish to god the Smartphones I've had in the past did the same - I ended up never using the WiFi support because it was such a pain.
• Voice quality (ie, "does it work as a phone?") is fine. I, and one other iPhone owner I've discussed this topic with, haven't had problems. The speaker volume (when being used as a speaker phone) is a bit quiet for my taste, but the audio quality has no issues I can tell. I suspect people who have problems are in poor-coverage areas.

The Bad:

• There are some minor annoyances in the iTunes Windows client UI. The one that bugs me the most is in the "select a folder" to sync photos UI. You can only select the top level folders on a drive, and not sub-folders. Since I store photos by year and topic (//server/photos/2007/summer BBQ), I can't sync specific events easily. I've also had a few crashes, usually when shifting tabs, saving changes, all the while the phone was syncing.
• While the UI is generally extremely consistent, there are odd exceptions to the rule that highlight the 1.0"ness" of the product. The one that always gets me is the difference between zooming back out on a photo or in Safari (double-tap) and the Google maps applet (tap two fingers).
• Camera is very, very (very) simple. One button to take a picture - that's it. No zoom, no cropping, no white balance, no flash, etc. The UI is nice and clean because of it, but I hope there will be some expansion here in the future.
• AT&T's EDGE network can be slow. The built-in WiFi support helps a lot here, but you really feel it when you're out of range of a hotspot.
• Applications are limited. The ones on the phone are nicely done and useful, but I'm already looking to external websites for "iPhone applications." I'm hoping that Apple opens up the platform to software developers over time.

The Ugly:

• Said it before, but no Exchange support is currently the biggest blocker to people I know adopting this phone. Yes, even more so than price... but remember, I live in the Seattle-area/Microsoft influenced part of the country. I fully expect price to be more of an issue elsewhere - though it appears Apple's sold over half a million of these guys in just one weekend, so they seem to be doing ok so far.

All-in-all, I really feel Apple's set a new bar here for a mobile communications device (note not just a "phone"). I'm really looking forward to seeing what Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and other mobile providers do with future devices. Competition is a good thing!

As with most things high-def, there's a lot of confusion around video codecs and what they do for you. I was pointed to this great summary of video codecs (including quality testing), and just wanted to share. It's an easy enough read such that most people won't get lost, and you'll begin to understand just why people get so passionate about their preferred codec.

Fun quote for the day:

Here’s a fun and jaw-dropping fact about digital video: At a post-production house, an uncompressed two-hour film in digital cinema resolution and quality will clock in at about 12 terabytes, less 9 to 18 gigabytes for the accompanying 16 channels of 48 or 96kHz audio.
Some of this can be explained away when you consider digital cinema’s 4096 x 2160 (or 4K) resolution, but the data rate is still monstrous – far too high for commercial cinemas to read and project, let alone store. This is why digital films are perfectly – or ‘losslessly’ – compressed to no more than 500GB, resulting in visually identical footage that requires a bit of decoding processor muscle.
Even after you account for the drop in resolution from 4K to 1080p, it’s still clear that no consumer format has enough space to deliver this kind of perfectly reproduced image quality. And that’s just the film – we haven’t even thought about the space needed for the extra features we’ve come to expect from our discs yet. This is where ‘lossy’ codecs come into play. They’re much more complex than lossless codecs, and we’ll examine them after we’ve looked at the basics of compression.

Microsoft just announced some cool new technology - basically a table-sized, multi-touch input display with intuitive UI. The videos are great - I love how the table reacts when drinks are placed on it. And I'm already imagining the interesting social/trivia games you could create in a bar - imagine SceneIt! with a team at every table.

No idea how much it costs, but I'd guess this it likely targeted at "professional" applications like bar surfaces or hotel guides... at least for now. But five or ten years from now? I may be looking at my new coffee table (and music/media interface!)

[YouTube:IqVNAnuQQyg]

Wanted to point you to some interesting new Microsoft technology - a high-capacity color barcode that can hold up to 3,500 characters of information. The BBC has a good summary, but I'll give you a quick quote here:

The code is made up of up to eight-different coloured triangles which are aligned left to right with each shape placed from point to base or vice versa.

That combination of colours and orientation of the triangles creates distinct patterns which can be read by piece of software which deciphers the data.

ISAN, the voluntary numbering system for the identification of audiovisual works, is the first organisation to license the technology.

By the end of the year the colour barcodes will appear on DVD disks and on Xbox 360 videogames.

 

Up to 3,500 characters of information can be held in the code.

Because the barcode can be read by mobile phone cameras it can be used to connect the packaging to the online world.

What's interesting about this is it's a way to tie physical objects to your online world. Nintendo has done similar things before with the Game Boy Advance e-Reader that allowed you to scan barcodes (which in turn unlocked game content). What's different about this new barcode is that we can store a lot more information (almost 3.5 Kb of data), and you won't necessarily need special hardware to read the code. A simple cell phone picture uploaded to the LIVE cloud might be all it takes to enable all sorts of new game scenarios.

You can imagine rare objects or limited edition content that comes with your game (with one-time use codes). Or games that allow you to trade physical objects but be able to take advantage of them in game scenarios. I love that the sample art is of Viva Pinata - imagine getting rare pinatas and trading them across LIVE.

I know there have been variants of this concept before, but I'm hoping a combination of the amount of data that can be stored and the ubiquity of connected devices like cell phones means this actually takes off and enables some new game scenarios. Oh, and don't mistake the data size as being too small - you're not going to be storing huge textures in that, but developers are very familiar with tokenizing their data and you'd be surprised how much you can do in ~3.5 Kb.

With full credit to Kim Pallister's blog for pointing it out, I wanted to share a great video that summarizes the evolution of the web and explains quite succinctly what all this "Web 2.0" stuff is about. Web 2.0 is a pretty over-burdened phrase these days, to the point where it's almost assumed to be a buzzword. Spend a minute and watch... I think you'll see there's some substance here.

[YouTube:6gmP4nk0EOE]

The big change is just as the video says: we're moving to a world where data is no longer tied to form and structure, and can be used in ways never before intended. You've all seen Google Maps mashups, right? That's just the tip of the iceberg. Think about what starts happening when "Web 2.0" concepts become a part of your gaming world. Imagine a world where tips to the section of the game you're playing are a button-press away, thanks to the game exposing metadata about where you are. What if you as users were creating that content? Or imagine being able to find interesting "content" (purposely using a very general word here) based upon ratings and rankings of your peers? And what happens when you add in the ability to rank and rate the feedback of those peers, and hence get a better sense of the value of the contributors opinion?

There will be some rough spots (as Penny Arcade so aptly captures below), but on the whole I'm super-excited about the next five years as we look ahead at bringing gaming and gaming features to the online community. Live Anywhere is just the tip of the iceberg....

Just wanted to share a couple of tech demo videos from Lucasarts' Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. What's interesting about these demos is that they really begin to show off the potential of next-generation systems, both for physics and AI. It appears Lucas has early rights to the technology, but you can imagine this sort of thing will become commonplace in other games over the next few years.

First off is a demo of "Digital Molecular Matter," or DMM for short. As the video says, DMM is a technology that looks to simulate how matter reacts in a physical world. Instead of having to model an object's destruction by hand (as is shown by the board in the video), the board actually reacts appropriately to impacts upon it. What's more, it reacts differently every time. You can also change the type of matter to simulate different breaking points. Very cool stuff - be sure to enjoy R2D2's little squeals as well!

[YouTube:jKDui2HU0pU]

The second demo shows off "Euphoria", or a next-generation AI system. Euphoria basically simulates intelligence and instinctive reactions in characters. You'll see stormtroopers try to catch onto the beams to save themselves, or even try to catch each other. It's all done on the fly - none of their actions are pre-scripted.

[YouTube:fWpmQzYWI44]

Pretty cool stuff. Spin ahead a few years and imagine the sorts of experiences this sort of tech can enable... I'm imagining Crackdown with a destructible cityscape and smarter inhabitants, for one.

Was pointed to flashearth.com, a virtual earth website that uses flash and your choice of many of the satellite map sites to give you a really cool globe browsing experience. I basically "surfed" down to my home neighborhood in a matter of seconds, as you can see here. Very, very cool - check it out!

Just saw over on Evil Avatar that a hardcore case modder took an Xbox 360 and made a "laptop" out of it - albeit one that's water-cooled and weighs 14 pounds! A couple of choice system specifications (quoted from Evil Avatar since the main website appears to be down):

1) 17" wide (diagonal) 1280x720 progressive-scan LCD VGA monitor (for HD-level resolutions)
2) Water-cooled with custom-built radiator
3) Built-in keyboard and Wi-Fi
4) USB hub allows original number of 3 USB ports
5) All-aluminum case, except for plastic keyboard / ring of light / screen control area
6) Single customized "expanded" power supply brick for both screen and Xbox 360
7) Breakout ports on back allow hookup to component TV, VGA monitor, sound system (analog or TOSlink) and composite video
8) Size: 16.75" x 10.75" x 2.8" Weight: 14 pounds (with water loaded)

I'll insert a few pics since the site is down, but definitely take a spin over when it's back up. Very cool!

And I thought I'd never get to use "tsunami" in a blog post... but indeed, in the random yet wicked-cool technology news category today is an article about someone using the read/write head sensor in hard drives to detect tsunamis. To quote:

As part of their operation, hard disks measure vibrations in order to keep the read-write head of the disk on track. These measurements can be read from some hard disks. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector captures this vibration data and shares it with computers in other locations connected via a peer-to-peer network to determine whether an earth tremor is occurring.

<snip>

If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the peer-to-peer network can then warn of such events.

The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour, Stadler explains on his Web site. The speed difference leaves time to evaluate tremors and, if necessary, warn of a tsunami.

I love random stuff like this! Anyway, you may now return to your regularly scheduled game-industry news surfing.

A few folks wrote me to point out the distributed client announcement from Stanford and Sony that will allow PS3 users to donate unused CPU cycles to a good cause. To quote the FAQ:

Our goal is to apply this new technology to push Folding@Home into a new level of capabilities, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer. With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.

A couple of people were interested in what I thought, and really, what can I say? It rocks - there's no reason not to use spare CPU cycles for a good cause, and I think Sony really hit a homerun here. To be fair, it's not a new idea. Seti@home has been doing this sort of thing for years, but this is the first time a console has been leveraged for this purpose. Have to give props to Sony for some original thinking there.

What'll be really interesting to see is whether this is something you can run at all times (ie, as a background process), or whether there will be some sort of low-power state you can leave your PS3 in such that you can continually donate CPU cycles without burning up the house. These new boxes (PS3 and Xbox 360) do draw more power that previous generations, and I'm hoping there's some thinking around the power consumption aspect.

Just saw a blog posting from Bryan Ressler, one of the Microsoft Labs PIX team members. In it he gives some details about the Photosynth technology preview the PIX team has been working on. Apparently, this technology takes a collection of photos from a location, analyzes them, and builds up a 3D space from that data you can explore. It's hard to describe, but pictures and videos can be found on the blog post above.

I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

"What if all the world’s billions of images were woven into a single gigantic Photosynth collection? What if you could visit any place, anywhere, through the eyes of the countless people who have photographed that place in the past? What if you could take a trip through time, seeing how a place changed as time went by?"

Very, very cool!

All that said, here's a question for you guys. I completely recognize this is more of a "cool technology" post, and doesn't have much to do with video games or the video game industry. (I could probably come up with some interesting game concepts down the road, but it's a stretch.) Are you interested in this sort of occasional non-game-related "it's just cool!" technology post? Or should I just stick to the game industry and (at least tangentially) related topics like HD-DVD, home theater, etc?

Thoughts?