What did 2012 do for technology?

Consumer Electronics

My next stop is Consumer Electronics. Let’s try and understand what 2012 did for this segment. I think rapid strides were taken in three sectors here – the Smart TV, Quadra core Tegra chips for mobiles and 4G.

Smart TVs: A generic name for those television sets that can be connected to the web and your cable operator, thus enabling you to access online services or stream films, besides, well, watching TV. It’s the 2-in-1 logic, you know, the type all of us like in any of our products. The most obvious use of this tech — it combines your personal entertainment and your online worlds. You can now watch TV, or surf, chat, use your social networks and even play Angry Birds using nothing but gestures, thanks to what has happened to this tech in 2012. In July last year, Samsung launched its US$10 000 Smart TV which has a pop-up camera that allows you to play the world-famous Angry Birds game by the simple waving of your hands.

On the other hand, Samsung’s traditional rival, LG, is said to be working to develop an Open webOS TV. It’s doing this in collaboration with the HP owned company, Gram. Yeah, yeah, before most of you dismiss this because of the fact that webOS was thought of being dead long ago, let me tell you that efforts are on to bring this OS back (WebOS was a mobile operating software initially developed by smartphone makers Palm and later offered by HP).

Quad core processors: While TVs got smarter in 2012, mobile computing devices including smartphones were getting speedier. The buzzword here was the Tegra processor, specifically the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ones. These chips enhance the performance levels of mobile computing devices, multi-fold, enabling consumers to use their computing devices for multi-tasking, or for twice the present speed internet browsing, console gaming… it even delivers HD video capabilities.

The Silicon Valley located NVIDIA, makers of the Tegra chips, has had a great 2012. Having introduced the Tegra 3 towards end of 2011- start of 2012, the new chip gave the much-needed boost to NVIDIA. Imagine this — today, the Tegra 3 chip powers the HTC One X, One X+, the Nexus 7 and the Windows Surface RT Tablet. Announcing its 2012 results, company officials said a third of the revenue came from non-PC chips like the Tegra 3.

Just a heads-up, in the first quarter of this year, Tegra is expected to come out with the Cortex A15 based Wayne chip, expected to compete against Qualcomm’s SnapdragonS4 Pro chips and Samsung’s Exynos 5.

4G: Since I am on mobile computing devices, the most obvious question that will come to your mind is the progress 4G made in 2012. Here’s a reality check – in some countries like the United States, Canada and Germany, the 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been around now for almost two years now. But in other western nations like the United Kingdom, the 4G mobile service was only rolled out in 11 cities towards the last quarter of 2012. The rest have to wait till 2013. At present, there are about 9-million users of LTE around the world.

In most of the countries like the UK and others who are still planning to adopt 4G, several challenges lie in the way, which may be the reason why things are delayed. For mobile operators, their network infrastructure need to be cranked up, while spectrum, too, remains an issue.

Artificial Intelligence

From faster and better performing computing machines, I now move on to the world of Artificial Intelligence. A lot seems to have happened on this frontier of science in 2012 – from robotics science to natural language interpretation to Virtual Reality (VR)-only life forms to machine translations.

Robotics science: In robotics science, Baxter was the hero of 2012. It is an entirely new robot that apparently is re-defining the way robots are used in the manufacturing sector. It performs a variety of repetitive tasks while intelligently working next to human beings.

It does not require costly programming and comes quite cheap compared to its contemporaries, at approximately US$22 000. So positive are user reviews that Baxter, a product of Rethink Robots, a company based in Boston, USA is now being referred to as ‘the robot with common sense’.

Machine translation: So while a robot is all set to take up our manufacturing burden, let’s find out what happened on the machine translation (MT) front in 2012. MT is software that tries to replace human linguists. Traditionally, so far, the translation industry has served two models — business to business and business to consumer. But MT holds promise for reaching out to the wider consumer market because of more and more mass access to smartphones and mobile computing devices.

MT is still an imperfect science but one that holds much promise because of the globalized world we now live in. After all, if you find yourself in a country whose language you do not understand, how easy and convenient it would be to get a machine to translate the local lingo for you?

Two notable developments happened on the MT front in 2012. The world’s first translation service integrating both, MT and Automated Speech Recognition was launched in the same platform by a many called the SAIC. The other was a service by NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest mobile network, for converting Japanese into English, Mandarin or Korean. Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft were said to be working on similar solutions. This kind of software based translations can help companies reduce their dependence, if not completely negate, on multilingual staff.

Virtual reality: Another area which saw some measure of progress in the year gone by. VR coupled with robotic technologies have had the potential to help neurosurgeons perform precise operations, and deployed in conjunction with virtual reality environments, help them navigate through human organs like the brain.

According to an introductory article by Garnette Sutherland, MD, in a special supplement to neurosurgery, the official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, VR and robotics were two rapidly expanding fields with growing application within neurosurgery.

According to a report in the Science Daily, Dr Sutherland’s paper also talks of robotic tools under development or already in use providing mechanical assistance, such as steadying the surgeon’s hand or “scaling” hand movements. Further, VR has started to play an important role in the medical field, providing “spatial orientation” between robotic instruments and the surgeon.

In a parallel development reported by Science Daily in October 2012, researchers ‘beamed’ a person into a rat facility, similar to what we have seen in the Star Trek movies. Using cutting-edge VR technology, it allowed the rat and human to interact with each other on the same scale.

Published on October 31 in PLOS ONE, the research enabled the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant in a VR environment interacted with a human-sized avatar that is controlled by the movements of the distant rat.

Oh, and by the way, the beaming up technology is now an international project funded by the European Commission to investigate how a person can visit a remote location via the internet. The visitor may be embodied as an avatar or a robot, to interact with real people.