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Views Television, Information & Telepresence Apart from the addition of more scanning lines, colour, a larger screen, and deteriorating programmes, television technology has changed little since the 1930s. It remains dominated by the cathode ray tube and is a limited and largely passive two dimensional medium! For a true technological leap forward we have to go well beyond the current industry desire to sell us higher definition (even more lines) and a slightly bigger (and wider) screen. In order to enhance that sense of reality, that sense of involvement, a much larger window is required - one that takes over a larger percentage of our visual cortex. Today we are just spectators - voyeurs - we stand back and look through a small window and see. We do not participate, we do not get involved, and we do not participate. But this need not be the case in the not too distant future. We are rapidly moving towards a world of information and experience on demand, interaction, immersion and instant gratification. TV can deliver much of this to the home and office by coalescing the personal computer, hi-fi system, television, radio, and fax machine. The first products merging television and PC are just arriving on the market and the trend looks set. Ultimately this will see integrated entertainment information and games environments at a cost that is far less than the individual items we buy today. As a first step in this direction Video On Demand (VOD) services are being tested in several trials world-wide. Here the viewer will ultimately have access to all the video material imaginable (more than 10,000 programmes is the current forecast). We can also confidently expect to see extensions into shopping, museums, art galleries, libraries - into the complete world of information. It is also worth reflecting that the power of this technology is doubling every 12 to 18 months with the computer on your desk today about a thousand times more powerful in a mere ten years. It is also conceivable that it will be a million times more powerful in the next 20 years. So we have to think of something new, something different. Not just a television set combined with a computer, but something with intelligence, something that helps us change the way we live, work and play. For any chance of success, it is essential that the user interface surpasses today's dreaded VHS controller, or for that matter the PC. If this is not the case we shall see a high proportion of the population effectively frozen out of this information future. Making information available to anyone aged between 3 and 90 is the great challenge - the technology has to be humanised. The way in which this is being addressed has already moved beyond the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the Shopping Mall, street, store or library paradigm. Here the user moves into familiar surroundings with information access framed as a real, rather than artificial, electronic book; a furniture store instead of a catalogue; travel agent instead of a brochure. Point and click can then be combined with verbal command and feedback, ultimately leading to conversation. In such an environment you have nothing to learn as all is familiar and intuitive. Beyond the interface we will be confronted by a vast choice with thousands of virtual shops and stores across the planet. Selecting a programme from a choice of a few tens of channels is manageable, a few hundreds is difficult, but 10,000 is impossible! This can be overcome with artificial intelligence primed to learn our changing interest profile. Such a system could even provide a degree of serendipity as it learns about our preferences, offering opportunities to see this or that film, purchase this or that wristwatch, tie, dress, shirt, tie, etc. Perhaps we will even be offered an electronically generated short form preview - the essence of the film, or opportunity, compressed into a few minutes. Today the Internet gives us just a glimpse of this future of infinite information and access. It is certainly near infinite, but it is slow, cumbersome and difficult to use. When the Pope had a library of 400 books just 500 years ago, he found it necessary to employ a librarian as the contents list, the index, the filing system and the retrieval mechanism. The librarian was also the regulator of information for he decided what you would see. This was a zero serendipity world. In contrast the Dickensian library of books, newspaper and magazine is full of serendipity that allows us to find things by chance. Compare this to today's Internet which is 100% serendipity. It is chaotic and you cant find things when you are looking for them, even when you know they are there. Moreover, it is so appealing to see such interesting things that the tendency is to just dwell for longer and longer. What is required is a rapid means of navigation, location and retrieval. Experience with Video on Demand and children interfacing with all forms of technology have shown there is an increasing demand for instant gratification. A world of 3 clicks and 1 second. Everything you want within 3 clicks of a mouse and on your screen within a second is a paradigm that we may yet aspire to. Such technology and access would see the electronic library migrate to an interactive learning centre where electronic books will be part of a larger selection of education materials including laboratory simulations, global vaults of information, virtual experiments with an interface that is humanised for text, speech, vision and touch. But to realise this dream will require new wide band networks to pipe the data to our office and home. Information at a rate that creates the illusion of reality. Such a facility will change many of our physical habits. Will it really be necessary to go shopping, visit the hospital, the doctor or indeed our friends and familes quite so much? With a combination of a camera embedded into the combined TV and computer, plus access to a wide band network each terminal becomes a video conferencing unit, a work space and a new means of accessing people, information and experience. And then? For a significant step beyond all of this we have to move to immersive systems with large (wall size) flat panel, head or eye mounted displays - a saturation of the visual, acoustic, and ultimately the tactile cortex to realise total interaction. With such technology we will no longer be spectators, but participants, part of the feature film, totally involved! This might seemed Sci-Fi and far fetched, and yet there is nothing here that has not been tried in research laboratories today! A simpler and more immediate technology, that is both stunning and well advanced, employs miniature TV cameras mounted at eye level, with microphones above the ears - a surrogate head! The output of this device can be coupled to a reciprocal set - a Virtual Reality headset. So, if I wear the surrogate headset, and you wear the VR headset, you effectively stand inside me looking out. What I see you see, what I hear you hear, and soon - what I feel you will feel. Why be limited to two people when we can broadcast to millions? In the 21st Century perhaps we will all go to the Olympic Games without leaving home, and we may stop watching and start participating! In the final analysis the primary limit to change and progress is us. Only 100 years ago most of us would most of us would have met less than 300 people and visited less than 20 towns in a lifetime. Today we can do this in a week! The future of television technology will see this potential increase as the world of work and play begin to merge. The workplace of the future is likely to be the office, home, hotel, car, plane and train. The space of work, the screen! The only question is; how many of us can adopt and adapt to this new world? The answer; how fast can it be humanised! |