Project Nightingale
This one is for Australia's "aging population".
Project Nightingale is a joint research effort between Smart Internet and NICTA which explores the needs of Australia's aging population and the role of Internet technologies in "reminiscing and memory sharing".
The project's goal is to develop non-desktop interfaces through which a user can access, organise and interact with their own virtual personal space within a pervasive computing environment.
Two prototype applications have been developed under Project Nightingale. The first involves a pen and paper scrapbook application scenario, using a personal server and intelligent digital pens. The interface of a digital scrapbook is just like a real scrapbook.
The scrapbook can consist of a number of pictures, written notes and user-drawn application markers, with the markers read and interpreted by the individual's personal server. The pen and paper is used for inputting data and controlling access to information with the system, with the various controls defined by the user. For instance, ticking a hand-drawn marker relating to an audio clip can replay that particular audio clip.
A second demonstration application utilises a tabletop user interface called Diamondtouch, from Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory (MERL) in the US. This user interface passes a small electric current through the user's body to determine their interaction with the surface of the interface. This allows a person to use simple physical gestures to share and manipulate media items, such as digital pictures, and to create relations between items that can be stored in a virtual personal museum. These photos can then be stored, printed or emailed by the users for a small price.
Eric Whitehouse, business development manager for the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications, said they are expecting to have Diamondtouch available in Internet cafés, coffee shops, photo booths and other outlets in two years.
He added that they are hoping to use short-range Bluetooth wireless data communication to send messages between personal server and other Bluetooth equipped devices in the vicinity such as a display screen, MP3 player, pen, headset or mobile phone.
Fibre up your home
One open day participant claims they have a cheaper solution -- that fulfils all necessary technical requirements -- for deployment of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).
The plastic fibre group of the Optical Fibre Technology Centre (OFTC) claims that its polymer fibre solution solves a critical problem confronting FTTH.
Simon Fleming, Australian Photonics CRC director, said price was the single biggest determinant of whether domestic FTTH applications will work.
"In fibre systems, the issue more often than not is the cost of actually deploying the fibre to each individual premise. One of the major costs is the labour and the equipment to actually terminate the fibre to the home. There are existing solutions to this but in those solutions you take away the advantage of high data rate," Fleming said.
"What we've come up with is a particular type of microstructured polymer optical fibre which is made cheaply from one single material but can retain the very large bandwidth whilst also having a reasonably large core size. In principle it is cheap to deploy but still provide the sort of data rate for the next generation application like video on demand," he added.
Fleming said that they are currently in negotiations with a global company that has the market position to be able to commercialise the fibre and have the resources to solve the remaining manufacturing problems and make the fibre in huge volumes.
"I believe it's the right technical solution but history shows that sometimes the right technical solution is not the one that's adopted. The time to market is an important issue. There is a window of opportunity here, at the moment the world is looking at deployment of fibre to the home. However, the product needs to be there in the market place in the very near future, otherwise another second rate solution will be deployed and then there's going to be a standards issue. It will then be much harder to break in later on with a stronger technology if another one is already in place," Fleming said.
He added that they were careful to partner with a company that had the right market position and size to develop the technology.
ZDNet Australia's Kristyn Maslog-Levis reported from Sydney. For more coverage from ZDNet Australia, click here.
