I had the unique opportunity to try the prototypes of the abovementioned personal transporters. The Winglet is similar to the Segway, yet smaller, made with much more plastic, and with a slightly different steering system. The Uni-cub is targeted towards indoor transport, such as for the elderly, and you move by shifting your weight, similar to the Segway again, but in the sitting position. Enjoy the videos.
Quite the day… have a look!
Below are my notes from Day 1 of the CEATEC show in Makuhari, Japan.
Sony showcased two unique social apps, Info Eye and Social Live, part of their Smart Social Camera initiative.
Info Eye takes an image and analyzes it for different types of information, surfacing that information in different views. For example, take a photo of the Eiffel Tower and you are presented with different "views" of the data. The first view may be related photos of the French attraction, such as a view from the top, or the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. Change views and you’re presented with a map of Paris. Continue to the next view and see your friends’ comments on social networks about the attraction. It certainly is an innovative approach to automatically get benefits from simple photo taking – photos you normally wouldn’t look at again anyway.
A video is worth thousands of pictures, and you already know what those are worth:
And in case you simply want a picture:
Social Live is like a live video feed, streamed from your phone to various social services. While the example of a live marriage proposal wasn’t so realistic, Social Live still has great consumer applications. For example, set a social live link on Facebook and your friends could view your video feed while you tour the Champs Elise in Paris, without your needing to initiate a Skype call. It’s similar to having a live broadcast stream ready to go at any time.
3D didn’t entice the world – again – so, why not re-use all that marketing material, swapping 4K for 3D? No, it’s not that bad, and 4K is beautiful, but it’s just too early, too expensive, as is almost every evolutionary technology like this. Just for fun I made a collage of the various offerings. Component innovation is once again creating products at a pace greater than the consumers’ willingness to adopt.
Intel had a sizeable display of Tizen OS based In-Vehicle Infotainment solutions at its booth. Apparently Intel had 800 developers working on Tizen while partnered with Nokia on the OS-formerly-known-as-MeeGo. The most interesting Tizen demonstration was Obigo’s HTML5-based IVI solution. On a related note, Samsung is apparently folding their Bada OS into Tizen. It will be interesting to see whether it makes any difference in the global mobile OS movement, still dominated by Android, then iOS, then Windows Phone.
Obigo’s solution is to automotive application development what PhoneGap is to standard mobile application development. Developers build widgets using HTML5 + JavaScript, accessing vehicle data and services via an abstraction layer provided by the Obigo engine. Apps in Obigo’s system are called widgets. Nothing appears to prevent Obigo from bringing this solution to Android, so look for that possibility on the various Android vehicle head units coming to market. Hyundai and Toyota will be the first integrators of the system.
Another solution shown at the Intel Tizen display was a driving habits monitor capable of sending an email to your insurance company with said information. The goal would be to lower insurance rates. The solution was a hokey implementation at best, but at least I’ve learned insurance is expensive here as well.
In an effort to keep Japan’s increasingly elderly population in touch with their families, Fujitsu has created a "Senior Cloud." The benefit to seniors will apparently be video and photo communication and sharing services with their family, alongside healthcare detail sharing services. I couldn’t get a demo, but it sounds like a good idea. For the next 10-20 years, anyway – by then, the "elderly" will have become the people who know how to do these things.
ModCrew displayed a nano-coating solution for iPhones (only), rendering your fruit phone washable.
Omron has a unique line of basil thermometers, with pleasant shapes and colors, targeted (obviously) towards women. The devices, among other Omron health device solutions, can all transmit their data via NFC to phones and tablets. Using an app from NTT DoCoMo, health data can be consolidated and analyzed, and health advice can be provided.
All health components gather data to recommend healthy choices.
Chinese consumer and mobile electronics provider Huawei showcased their HW-01D feature phone with a built-in panic alarm. Targeted towards women, children, and the elderly, the device has a pull tab that sets off a loud, yet oddly pleasant, siren to scare away would-be perpetrators.
Fujitsu’s Finger Link solution uses a top-mounted camera to convert physical objects to virtual objects, enabling you to organize and relate such items for later manipulation. For example, put 3 Post It notes down and they are converted to digital representations, automatically recognized as separate objects. Tap each related item and drag a line between others similar to the first. Tap a button on the projected interface and now they’re related, moveable, sharable, and more.
A hot item in vehicles displayed at CEATEC this year was detection of distracted driving. Fujitsu’s component detects eyes moving away from the road, a downward or upward motion possibly signifying the driver is drowsy. The component is for use by automotive integrators.
Fujitsu showcased an open LOD utilization platform for quickly and easily mining and analyzing the data from many Open Data sources all at once, visually. The back-end is using the SPARQL query language.
Mitsubishi showcased a prototype 4K Red Laser + LED backlit display, enabling a beautiful, beyond photorealistic video display. Standing in front of the reference unit, I actually felt like I was looking through a window – the colors were amazingly vivid and lifelike.
Mitsubishi also showcased a solution for preventing elevator stalls in swaying skyscrapers. Their sensor moves the elevator cart to a non-swaying or less-swaying floor to prevent service outages, keeping the elevators running as efficiently as possible, and giving you one less excuse to miss that meeting.
Mitsubishi showcased a 100 gigabit/second inter-city optical interconnect solution, with a range up to 9000 kilometers.
Who says you need multi-core ARM processors running over 1 GHz + powerful GPUs for beautiful embedded device interfaces? Mitsubishi sure doesn’t. They showcased a GPU running at a scant 96 MHz, accelerating vector graphics display at up to 60 frames per second. Incredibly responsive interfaces for elevators and boat tachometers were displayed. The target is rich user interfaces with incredibly low power consumption.
Related notes:
It’s no surprise Mitsubishi is proposing rear projection solutions for automotive – RP is one of the company’s strengths. What they propose is curved surfaces to provide an interface that matches the interior of the vehicle. Also possible is 3D-like interfaces, as shown below.
A display with no bezel? Sharp’s frameless concept showcases how beautiful such a solution would be. That it in the center.
Also on display (ahem) was the Mirror Type Display, with a display built into a mirror. Have I said display enough times?
That shiny new ultrabook is pretty svelte, isn’t it? What’s that? You want to watch a Blu-ray? That’s fine – just use Pioneer’s BDR-WFS05J solution to wirelessly connect to the Blu-ray drive across the room and stream the data over 802.11N, as long as it’s in its dock. The unit also supports USB 2 and 3. Ships at the end of September.
Toyota showcased a smart home energy management system (HEMS) using Kinect to interact with various residents.
I don’t know much about the following one-person electric riders, but they looked cool, so enjoy the photos.
Determining whether you’re driving Green, or "Eco" as they say in Japan, can be difficult. Clarion’s EcoAccel app, which runs on their Android-powered head unit, reads ODB2 sensor data to rate your Eco driving habits. It’s an entertaining way to enhance the eco-friendliness of your driving routine. The representative said there are no current plans to bring this product Stateside, but I’m hoping they change their mind. After all, ODB2 data is pretty easy to read, even if it’s not entirely standardized.
While the HUD component is nothing to write home about, Mazda’s approach of keeping everything at eye level, while re-organizing the shift knob to also be easily manipulated was a welcome safe-driving-meets-ergonomics approach. Better yet, they will be shipping this in their Axela vehicles, meaning less expensive vehicles may be readily receiving technology to deter distracted driving. They call this the Heads Up Cockpit with a Concentration Center Display.
Mazda also showcased the Mazda Connect system, enabling car communication and software components to be "easily" upgraded as new features are available. Whether this will be an insanely expensive solution, akin to Samsung’s upgradeable TV approach, remains to be seen.
It’s fascinating to see how some of the most innovative products are coming from what used to be one of the least innovative industries: automotive.
Today I had the unique opportunity to experience a fully autonomous – i.e. no actual driving required – vehicle, a prototype. From being a concept vehicle a few short years ago to now an automobile actually allowed on the road, Nissan’s EV-that-could has made incredible progress. I have included the video below, including a Q&A with one of Nissan’s engineers.
Murata’s components for sonic transmission and reception are being used to create a gesture recognition interface, ideal for hands free control of tablets and other devices. This technology could be used for games, such as Fruit Ninja, providing a 3D space in which to work. The gesture X, Y, and Z coordinates can be determined. An SDK is available, provided by Elliptic Labs. Only single point recognition is supported at this time, but Elliptic claims multi-gesture support is in the works.
Other notes:
Mitsumi demoed a heads-up display for automotive use, preventing distracted driving. The reference exhibit utilizes a laser pico projector and piezoelectric transmission to the mirror rather than the electromagnetic approach their competitor Macrovision (?) uses.
The projected resolution is claimed to be 1024×640, although I’m unsure if that was a mis-translation – they’re only using a QHD (quarter-HD) panel.
The device is expected to be shipped to integrators by 2017-2018. End user access could take longer, as integrators decide how to best implement the technology.
ALPS showed what happens when you buck the trends of the traditional car cockpit.
Utilizing cameras, biometric sensors, wireless charging and transmission, the cockpit can ensure the driver is authenticated, isn’t sleepy, and provide them access to all their phone’s media.
Other notes:
The system uses a camera and laser to point the user to places in the vehcile, such as where to place their phone. It’s encouraging to see more manufacturers thinking outside the traditional configuration. A lack of such leads us to retaining QWERTY as the default keyboard layout 
Modern portable DC-DC converters are still quite inefficient, but a recent collaboration between ALPS + MyWay + ROHM may change that forever. The trio has created a much more efficient dc-dc converter – it’s 1/10 the size, 1/5 the weight, and many times more efficient than traditional systems.
The unit is smaller due to its switching frequency, which is 100KHz , versus 15KHz in current solutions, while still providing effectively the same amount of power.
The module will be sold by MyWay by the end of October 2013.
Possible applications of the module will be significantly smaller and more efficient charging stations and electric vehicle power systems. This could further increase the range of EV systems allthewhile using less space.
While I haven’t yet visited the Intel booth, it sure looks cool.
NEC has created a portable DNA analyzer capable of analyzing DNA indicators at crime scenes and determining any possible suspect matches through integrated database searching. The company has combined the functions of three DNA machines used on crime scenes into a single, smaller unit. Rather than taking two days to process the samples, it can return results in about an hour, with a target of 30 minutes being their next goal. The database searching is optional and does not significantly affect the unit’s processing time either way.
Other Notes:
NTT DoCoMo showed their take on the software solutions possible when a camera and OS are attached to a glasses interface. They called these scenarios and software solutions “intelligent glasses,” even though no product is shipping as of yet.
The units had a QHD panel for the interface, with full movie playback capability.
In the example pictured above, the glasses are generating an overlay touch interface on the book she’s holding.
Above is their concept for an augmented reality application. Hands can be tracked in 3D space for manipulating an object projected in the lens display.
One incredible application utilized text and face recognition. Looking at a menu in Japanese, for example, overlaid the English translation over the text. Users could also find and recognize faces in the crowd, making it easier, say, to find your children at a parade, or social media contacts in a crowd based on their online photos.
NTT already has a similar translation feature on their smartphone products.
Other Notes:
NTT demonstrated a 5G solution utilizing arrays of 100 microantennae to boost per-user signal strength and data transmission. Their goal is to provide 1 GBit/second rates to all users, with up to 10 GBit/second under “ideal” circumstances.
Below are photographs from their 5G simulation:
Other Notes:
Yahoo’s logo has finally been revealed. But how did they come up with it, you ask? Well, watch the video below to find out the lines and swoops and music that inspired their creation. Still, a conversation with a creative director would have been better, but I’m happy nonetheless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_0b6qaPY-CQ
I struggled with this for about a day, and there were a lot of sites saying I should just use button.ID or button.UniqueID to set the default button for a panel. Nope, that wasn’t working. Some users were complaining the issue was only occurring on setting default button when in a control contained in a Master page.
The error would be:
The DefaultButton of panel or page must be the ID of a control of type IButtonControl.
So, here’s what you do to fix it:
// Set the default buttons.
((Panel)Page.FindControl(nameofthepanel.UniqueID)).DefaultButton = nameofthebutton.ID;
I hope that helps 
Best,
-Auri
Picked up the Evo 3D, read the reviews, all great except for battery life. True, battery life is nowhere near on par with the iPhone, something HTC really needs to work on. That being said, I didn’t want to require charging my phone after 5 hours, as a few reviews appeared to allude. Unfortunately, this appears to be due to the device shipping with a bunch of settings enabled that, well, shouldn’t be. So, here’s what you do:
Really, how often do you use those? Sure, when you’re at home or the office, WiFi is fine. But GPS? Seriously? Unless you need directions to everywhere you go, or you need apps to have pinpoint accuracy of your location, you don’t need those services running.
And 4G, regardless of carrier, is a joke. Yeah, it’s fast, but it really does kill your battery. Maybe in a year or two we’ll have the chipsets that are power efficient enough to enable keeping it on all the time. Right now? No, it’s just like laptops with NiCad batteries. Remember that? If you do, you’ll commiserate. If you don’t, be happy you have Lithium Ion in your devices these days. 3G is perfectly fine for almost anything you’ll do on your phone. Hey, it’s still faster than a lowball DSL connection. Cool, eh?
With the above settings, my Evo 3D runs fine for a whole day, even with average app usage. “Average” for me is a round or two of Angry Birds, a few Foursquare checkins, checking my email a number of times, taking a photo or two, and keeping Skype & Facebook running in the background.
I hope this helps you!
Auri's Blog 