Transcript TV of Tomorrow

Mediating Technologies
Peng Chang: [email protected]
Shuheng Zhou: [email protected]
Information Age Vision
• Digital Technologies
• change how we express ourselves
• how we communicate with others
• how we perceive, think about and interact with our world.
– Current Status:
• Crude, unwieldy, and unpersonalized, poorly matched to human needs
of their users. Just like a researcher in MIT said, “Today’s computer
technology is just capable of being able to bother people everywhere
without necessarily help them anywhere.”
Media of Tomorrow
• Tomorrow’s media applications will have more
characteristics:
–
–
–
–
–
Intelligent: in a sense, it thinks.
Personalized: it serves for your own interests.
Affective: it feels your mood.
Sociable: it connects you with others as a community.
...
• We will present TV of tomorrow and personal information
system as two examples of tomorrow’s media applications.
One Example: TV
• Today’s TV: you do have a remote control, but all
you can do with it is to switch channels.
• Tomorrow’s TV: it is more like a WWW browser
– on-demand: you get exactly what you want
– user participated: you can even involve into the movie
you are watching.
john
kathy
Core Techniques
• Distributed intelligent databases: Media Bank
– pull based delivery paradigm
– object oriented representation
– fully distributed media through dynamic links
• Structured Media
– from waveform representation of two dimentional images
toward more semantically and physically meaningful
representation of scenes
Media Bank
Heterogeneous Distributed Pull Based Architecture
for the Delivery of Object Oriented Multimedia
across Packet Switched Networks.
Structured Media
•
More meaningful representations of video sequences can be obtained by video
analyzing and scene understanding with computer vision and machine learning
techniques. But this is still a very difficult task based on today’s techniques
and various research projects are actively going on along this direction.
– For example: a blob representation of a human being
dance
Personal Information Architecture
• Marathon Man
• The Filament Chip
– a lightweight connection to networks
• Self Organizing Wireless Network
Marathon
Man
Trimble Lassen GPS Receiver
iRX 2.1 PIC board
Polar Heart Rate Monitor
StarTac phone
Filament Chip
• Challenge: design an ‘IP Lite’ chip to make it
easy to connect something as simple as a light
switch to a computer network.
• Answer: Single-chip network controller
– core would be independent of Link Layer
– “host” assumed to be a small slow chip with
limited RAM such as a PIC
– take on real-time requirements for buffering
datagrams and sending ACKs
The Density of Network
•
•
•
1984: 10, 000 nodes in US
1990: 10, 000 in Boston
Area
1996: 10, 000 at MIT
campus alone
2002: 10, 000 at media lab
•
Imagine if you will...
•
– Network connections
cost under $10 each
– hundreds of
connections in a single
room
•
What’s Required
• To achieve high-density networking:
– Nodes must be wireless
– Nodes must be low-power
– Overall network must be self-organizing
• ... and some corollaries:
– No base stations
– Distributed routing and administration
– Limited storage and computational resources
The Virtue of Locality
• Conserving power:
– Reducing transmit range from 200 meters to 6 meters is a factor of 1000
reduction in power. Milliwatts become microwatts.
• Conserving airwaves:
– Reducing transmit range allows physically separate nodes to broadcast
simultaneously.
• The Moral:
– Today, wireless LAN systems are rated by how far individual
nodes transmit.
– As network densities increase, a better figure of merit will be how
near they transmit.
Infrastructure
• For high-density
networks, you want:
– no base stations
– no distinction between
routers and nodes
– infrastructure created
simply by adding
nodes
Network is the computer
• Application sectors for Hyphos networks
–
–
–
–
Wireless LAN
Active Inventory: manufacturing, warehousing, shipping
Industrial controls and sensors
Home and "last meter" delivery
• So maybe Sun Microsystems had it right: the network is the computer.
But for those of those who still think that computers are the important
component, consider this: when everyday objects become connected to
digital networks, these same objects can become input and output
devices for computers. Among other things, this will give computers
much richer means of interaction with people and with the
environment. Before long, we'll think it strange that people ever sat at
a screen with a keyboard and a mouse.
Why do you connect these devices to network?
•
Perhaps the most interesting application for Hyphos networks is in the home, where we
can really start to connect everyday objects to networks. Why should you ever have to set
a clock? When a clock is on the network, it can contact the local Network Time Protocol
server and always be within a few milliseconds of the cesium clocks at the National
Bureau of Standards. A smoke detector that beeps in the basement isn't effective if you're
asleep on the third floor. When it's connected to a network, it will be able to alert you
regardless of where you are, even if you're driving on your way to work. Your washing
machine, if it's feeling ill, can contact www.maytag.com and download some diagnostic
software. And if it detects a problem, it can alert the local Maytag repairman that he
finally has a job. All the major appliances in your house could negotiate with the local
power company to cut back on usage a few percent during peak hours. By reducing the
peak loads, this could save the utility companies billions of dollars. My local telephone
company charges $75 to do any internal wiring inside a house. Using a Hyphos network,
the phone line terminates outside the house and the "last meter" connections are made
wirelessly. In fact, some enterprising service provider could subsidize the cost of a
"hyphos gateway" for use in the home. For a monthly fee, all of the everyday objects on a
Hyphos network now have access to the internet. Your VCR will have the entire TV
guide available to it. A child's toy can be in contact with www.disney.com to download
new learning activities every day. --answering question proposed in class seminar
References
• Web sites
– http://www.media.mit.edu/Research
– http://www.media.mit.edu/Projects/tvot
– http://www.media.mit.edu/Projects/pentland.html
– http://www.media.mit.edu/pia/
– http://www.pedinc.com/