TV of Tomorrow

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Mediating Technologies
Peng Chang peng_at_cs.cmu.edu Shuheng Zhou
szhou_at_ece.cmu.edu
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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, Todays computer
  technology is just capable of being able to
  bother people everywhere without necessarily help
  them anywhere.

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Media of Tomorrow

• Tomorrows 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 tomorrows
  media applications.

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One Example TV

• Todays TV you do have a remote control, but all
  you can do with it is to switch channels.
• Tomorrows 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
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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

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Media Bank
Heterogeneous Distributed Pull Based Architecture
for the Delivery of Object Oriented Multimedia
across Packet Switched Networks.
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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 todays techniques
  and various research projects are actively going
  on along this direction.
• For example a blob representation of a human
  being

dance
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Personal Information Architecture

• Marathon Man
• The Filament Chip
• a lightweight connection to networks
• Self Organizing Wireless Network

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Marathon Man
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Trimble Lassen GPS Receiver
iRX 2.1 PIC board
Polar Heart Rate Monitor
StarTac phone
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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

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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

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Whats 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

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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.

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Infrastructure

• For high-density networks, you want
• no base stations
• no distinction between routers and nodes
• infrastructure created simply by adding nodes

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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.

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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

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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/