CES 2008: Augmented Reality, the Pervasive Internet, and Intel’s Canmore

Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini put on a terrific dog and pony show today at CES. The intro music was set to the tune of The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star (the first tune played by MTV when it went on the air in 1981, presaging the end of “music as we know it”). In Intel’s musical rendition, the Internet has killed or is killing all entertainment media “as we know it”: CDs, DVDs, printed photos, etc. The Internet is replacing all of these media with pervasive, 24/7, online access to a bottomless ocean of bits. Otellini’s thesis: the consumer electronics (CE) industry is only just starting to embrace the Internet.

Now if this sounds out of date to you, if you think that the Internet already permeates every open pore in the face of CE, consider Otellini’s next rabbit out of the hat. First, he said “today, you have to go to the Internet to get something.” That means search, as in Google owns everything it touches. In the future, says Otellini, the Internet will come to you.

At that point, “Craig” walks out along with a set designed to evoke a street in Beijing. We’re pretending to be visiting Olympics tourists and we can’t read the street signs. Craig takes his handy portable digital assistant and aims it at a street sign. The sign is written in Chinese characters. Giant video screens replicate what Craig is seeing on his small PDA, which is jacked into the ballroom’s video system via a coaxial cable. In a couple of seconds, the blue street sign in Chinese is overlaid with another computer-generated blue street sign. This one says “Walnut Street.”

Welcome to augmented reality, real time.

We’re hungry and a convenient Chinese restaurant is nearby. Unfortunately, the menu is posted in Chinese. No problem. Craig aims the PDA at the menu on the wall and it appears in English on the PDA. Not only that, but the PDA calls up a video clip of someone reviewing the restaurant. The food is very good. Highly recommended.

We’re lost and we want to find the way to a stadium. A lady on a bicycle rides onto the stage. Craig asks her for directions to the stadium. She replies in Mandarin. An impasse. But not with augmented reality. Craig speaks into his PDA. In moments, his question emerges, translated into spoken Mandarin. The lady says “Oh cool!” except she says it in Mandarin. Her exclamation emerges from the PDA in English after a few seconds of translation.

Welcome again to augmented reality.

We’re not done. We decide to go on a tour of China’s Great Wall (a piece of which which conveniently emerges onto the stage from a side door). Craig points the PDA’s camera at the Great Wall and an animated Terra Cotta warrior appears superimposed over the real-time image. The warrior is our virtual tour guide. The PDA uses GPS to augment visual recognition of landmarks and it downloads information over the Internet based on the context of the picture taken by the PDA’s camera.

Otellini points out that a mobile product that is aware of its context in an environment and that uses that context to automatically access data from a pervasive Internet will require “exponentially more processors using exponentially less power.” Now this is Intel, so you might rightly assume he’s talking about more x86 processors, as in multiple x86 cores. He’s not. He’s talking about new chip families that Intel will be rolling out over the next three to five years.

One of those families, said Otellini, is Canmore. Canmore is not a processor, it’s a CE-centric SOC. To be sure, it contains an x86 processor for all that Internet-access stuff. In addition, it has a “dedicated A/V processing that can play 1080p video with 7.1 surround sound, a 3-D graphics unit for cool user interfaces and online games, and technologies to enable broadcast TV.” Otellini then showed a Canmore-powered DVD-player sort of box displaying video on a flat-panel display. He also showed an ultra-mobile PC based on Intel’s Menlow low-power chipset and processor platform. Intel is going for low-power and the CE market, bit time.

Smart CE devices will need three things according to Otellini:

• Pervasive wireless Internet infrastructure (WiMAX)
• Context
• Natural user interfaces

We don’t have those things at the moment, said Otellini, but Intel is interested in partnering with companies that want to make these things real.

Any bets on when the Internet will actually consume all other forms of media?