A Multimedia Archaeological Tour On Your Mobile

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #186, June 14, 2006)

An Italian-led research project is developing a service that allows visitors to use their camera-phones to get a personalized multimedia guide to archaeological sites and museums. The Agamemnon project is working on an interactive multimedia system that provides relevant text, videos, audio and pictures with 3D reconstructions, to visitors’ mobile telephones, says Matteo Villa, an engineer from the project coordinator, Milan-based TXT e-Solutions. Agamemnon tailors a visit path based on site visitors’ interests, cultural knowledge and time available. The on-screen itinerary constantly updates as the visitor moves around the site. The system’s image-recognition function allows visitors to dial in, photograph objects they are interested in and receive information about them. Agamemnon also takes voice commands. The IST (Information Society Technologies)-funded project, named after the king of Mycenae, leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War, began in January 2004 and is scheduled to end on June 30, 2006. Its computer scientists and technicians developed the system’s software from scratch, based on a Java Enterprise backbone with JavaBean components. They are currently testing the research prototype in pilot sites in Paestum, Italy, and Mycenae, Greece.

In the pilot projects, staff members are pretending to be site visitors, to see how everything works. “We are getting positive results, but there are still a few things to fine tune,” says Villa. “The image recognition technology, which uses telephone’s digital camera as an input-output device, is one of the last parts that needs to be finished. For example, some of the monuments are in good condition. Those are easy to recognize. However, others are just a few rocks, and those can be extremely difficult to identify correctly.” In experiments at the University of Genoa, which developed the system’s image-processing algorithms, researchers are using GPS to boost image recognition results. Although some phone models already have GPS, this feature will be more feasible for future phone models, on which GPS functions will be more common. Since archaeological sites are sometimes in remote areas not covered by high-speed networks, the system includes options for low-bandwidth connections, but supplying less information.

The use of connected cameras — primarily camera-phones today — as input-output devices, is rapidly increasing. Every week, at least one or two new projects or technologies is added to the mix that enable users to photograph an object, sign, ad, printed code, or embedded watermark and retrieve information or trigger a transaction of some kind. We believe the trend will continue to grow, not only generating increased data revenues for carriers and application providers, but also more consumer benefits and increased interest in actually using the cameras in their phones. If component suppliers, handset vendors, and operators can deliver a satisfactory experience and improved image quality, who knows where this might lead? A mounting spiral — dare we say a virtuous circle — of usage and profits and ever more innovative and unexpected applications? Precisely what we’ve been predicting — and impatiently awaiting — since we began publication of this newsletter four years ago. [Europe, components, content, handsets, services, usage]

DoCoMo Launches Credit Card Phones

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #185, June 7, 2006)

DoCoMo announced in April its intention to launch DCMX consumer credit services via iD, DoCoMo’s brand and platform for mobile credit cards, and this week the carrier delivered on its promise by releasing three handsets with DCMX. Users of Osaifu-Keitai (mobile wallet) phones in the 902iS series will be able to choose from two plans to make highly secure purchases from small to large amounts using their phones as DoCoMo-issued credit cards. Making a purchase is as simple as waving one’s phone in front of a dedicated iD reader/writer in a store, with no signature required. Payments will be billed together with the user’s monthly DoCoMo phone charges. There will be no membership fee to use the service. DCMX mini service offers a monthly credit line of ¥10,000 ($88), while credit lines from ¥200,000 ($1,765), as well as cash advances, will be available under the full DCMX service. Purchases over ¥10,000 will require the customer to enter a four-digit password.

Users under age 20 will require a guardian’s consent, and must apply at a DoCoMo Shop, accompanied by a guardian. Customers will be able to use their mobile phones to confirm remaining credit balances. For security, DoCoMo Osaifu-Keitai phones can be locked remotely if misplaced or stolen. The user will merely need to call their misplaced/stolen phone from a registered phone number. Or, using the Omakase Lock service, the user will be able to call DoCoMo to request their phone be locked. Users can also set their phones to require a password each time before the DCMX service is used.

The three new DCMX phones are the D902iS from Mitsubishi, the N902iS from NEC, and the P902iS from Panasonic. In addition to the new credit card and now-familiar mobile wallet functions (there are more than three million Osaifu-Keitai in Japan), the handsets offer the usual rich smorgasbord of features found in Japanese phones.

The slider model D902iS has a 4MP CCD auto-focus main camera (2MP Super CCD Honeycomb sensor from Fuji Photo Film) with 28x, 65-step digital zoom, anti-shake technology and a sliding lens cover that activates the camera. There’s also a CIF (288 x 352-pixel) CMOS sub-camera for video calls, support for miniSD removable media, and a 2.8-inch, 240 x 400-pixel, 262,144-color TFT LCD that offers a mode that makes it difficult for others to see the display. In addition to the security features noted above, the 110 x 49 x 19.9-mm, 124-gram D902iS offers “voice certification,” which recognizes a security keyword in the user’s voice to unlock the wallet functions.

The N902iS — a 104 x 51 x 23-mm, 114-gram clamshell model — also sports a 4MP CCD auto-focus main camera (again produced by a 2MP Super CCD Honeycomb sensor from Fuji) with anti-shake technology (“super digital hand blurring revision function”). There’s also a VGA CMOS sub-camera for video calling, support for miniSD, and a 2.5-inch, 240 x 345-pixel, 242,144-color TFT LCD main display and a 1-inch, 120 x 90-pixel, 65,536-color TFT LCD sub-display. The N902iS has two additional features worth noting that utilize the handset’s cameras. The first is a face recognition function that can be used to control access to the mobile wallet functions and other protected applications. We assume the technology was supplied by Neven Vision, which supplied the same functionality for the Sharp SH902i introduced last October [“Neven Vision’s Face Recognition on FOMA Phone,” MIR #175, March 15, 2006]. The second feature utilizes image recognition technology from Evolution Robotics [“Evolution Robotics’ Visual Search,” MIR Wee #182, May 17, 2006] to identify products and locate them in an online store. The combination of DCMX credit card services, 4MP camera, and image recognition offered by the N902iS would make it possible to instantly buy a watch in the window of a store that is closed, for example, or a piece of clothing worn by a model in an advertisement. Companies such as Amazon and Tower Records will make their products available through the service.

The P902iS — another clamshell model, measuring 106 x 49 x 21 mm and 109 grams — has a 2MP Maicovicon primary camera with 12.5x, 31-step digital zoom and a CIF CMOS sub-camera. There’s support for miniSD, a 2.4-inch, 240 x 320-pixel, 262,144-color TFT LCD main display, and a 1.0-inch, 4,096-color, STN LCD sub-display as well as a 7 x 7 dot matrix of white LEDs for displaying various information and custom lighting effects. The P902iS is also equipped with an advanced face authentication security function that enables the user to lock the IC card and PIM functions in “Double Security” mode together with the handset PIN number. There’s also a timer function that locks protected applications after a specified interval when you close the handset. The Panasonic phone also has Bluetooth, still relatively rare for Japanese phones, most of which have Infrared. The P902iS is compatible with DoCoMo’s Chaku-Uta Full service enabling users to download full music tracks from i-mode sites and comes pre-installed with ‘2006 FIFA world cup German conference’ i-applications.

The advanced features and functionality of the 902iS series highlight once again what a backward, third world country we are in the U.S. as far as mobile phones are concerned. It’s been five and a half years since camera-phones were introduced in Japan and three and half since they were introduced in the U.S., but we’re no closer to closing that two-year gap than we were in 2002. If anything, the gap seems to be widening. We’re nowhere near having mobile phones with this kind of functionality. Sigh. [Asia/Pacific, WPAN, WWAN, handsets, infrastructure, services, carriers, usage]

New Scale Debuts ‘World’s Smallest Motor’

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #184, May 31, 2006)

 The latest Squiggle motor from New Scale Technologies, Inc. is the smallest linear motor on the market, the company announced last week. At 1.5 x 1.5 x 6 mm, New Scale says the new SQL-1.5 piezoelectric motor is half the size of competing micro-motors. It also offers a 20 gram push force and sub-micron position resolution, performing ten times better than its closest competitor on both counts. The company says the SQL-1.5 is easier to manufacture and draws lower power than the liquid lens approach. It is also much further down the road to commercialization — having already been designed into next-generation auto-focus and optical zoom assemblies by leading camera module developers, who support the top tier handset manufacturers.

“The SQL-1.5 opens a whole new range of performance for miniature electronic systems such as phone cameras and medical devices,” said New Scale president David Henderson. “Designers of leading edge mobile devices finally have a precise, reliable linear motor that fits within their size and power budgets. They can add motion — and hence new capabilities — where they were unable to do so before.”

The SQL-1.5 is also of interest to medical device manufacturers for a new class of implantable drug pumps and micro-valves. The motor itself is tiny, but its high precision is what enables the most dramatic reduction in overall device size. It provides more precise valve control, which permits more concentrated medications and therefore smaller fluid reservoirs. The patented ceramic motor design [“New Scale Patents Squiggle Motor,” MIR #160, November 23, 2005] generates no magnetic fields and can be made of non-ferrous materials, making it MRI-safe and image compatible. [North America, components]

New Walkman Phones From Sony Ericsson

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #183, May 24, 2006) 

Sony Ericsson on Thursday announced five new mobile phones for the end-of-year holiday shopping season, including two Walkman phones. So far this year, the Japanese-Swedish joint venture has unveiled more than 20 new models. It introduced 30 models in all of last year. “We’re strengthening our position within the segments where we are strong, like the Walkman music phones,” said product manager for the Nordics region Ola Lilja Molen, adding he saw huge demand for the Walkman products of which the company now has 10 different models at various prices.

The new W710 Walkman includes a motion sensor and fitness software programs to keep track of physical exercise while listening to music from the radio or stored on the phone’s memory cards. “Consumers told us that one of the most popular times to listen to music is when exercising. We wanted to make sure consumers only need to carry one device instead of two or even three: a mobile phone, an MP3 player and a step counter,” said Steve Walker, head of product marketing. This, of course, is one of the primary advantages of incorporating more and more functionality into mobile phones: You’re going to carry your mobile anyway, so why not make it a music player and a camera and a mobile wallet as well (not to mention a pedometer, GPS device, barcode scanner, game console, TV set, etc.), so you don’t have to carry an iPod or a DSC or your wallet or a Game Boy or PMP or anything else for that matter? As these ‘secondary’ functions get better and more compact, the converged solution becomes ever more attractive.

In addition to its music functions — MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ player, RDS FM Radio and active stereo headset — the quad-band GSM/EDGE clamshell W710 has a 2-megapixel camera with 2.5x digital zoom and video recording, a 176 x 220-pixel, 262,144-color TFT LCD main display, a 128 x 128-pixel, 4-grayscale, STN sub-display, Memory Stick Micro M2 slot including a 512 MB card and USB mass storage support, Bluetooth, Infrared, and a new pedometer sensor and fitness application. It measures 88 x 48 x 24.5 mm and weighs 101 grams.

The 3G W850 is the first slider-style Walkman model, the first with A2DP stereo Bluetooth, and has new TrackID music recognition software from Emeryville, California-based Gracenote to make it easier to navigate through thousands of songs and find names of tracks. It can also record straight from the included RDS FM radio. The W850 has a 2-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and flash, a second camera for 3G video calls, a 2-inch, QVGA, 262,144-color TFT LCD, Memory Stick PRO Duo with USB mass storage support, Bluetooth, and Infrared. [Europe, WPAN, WWAN, handsets]

Fluid Lens Startup Gets CIA Funding

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #182, May 17, 2006)

Rhevision Technology, Inc., a San Diego developer of miniature tunable optical systems, announced the completion of its first venture financing, led by EDF Ventures and joined by In-Q-Tel, the independent investment fund that identifies innovative technologies to support the mission of the Central Intelligence Community (CIA) and the larger Intelligence Community. The funding announcement brought the company to our attention and put them squarely on our radar screen.

“Soon, camera-phones will have image sensors comparable to the quality of digital still cameras. What’s lacking is the optical zoom and auto-focus functions due to size, weight and cost limitations,” says Rhevision’s CEO, Tim Rueth. “Our optical zoom lenses will meet these market demands and offer auto-focus and 3x optical zoom while fitting in the small form factors of new cell phone designs. Our unique and proprietary approach will prove superior to competing approaches.”

Although the company is still essentially in stealth mode, we were able to ferret out a bit of information about Rhevision’s tunable lens systems “that will revolutionize the world of mobile imaging.” (You know that phrase caught our attention.) Developed by Professor Yuhwa Lo’s group at the University of California at San Diego and then spun out into a separate company, the Rhevision approach tunes the focal length of each lens in its system by simply adjusting the fluidic pressure. The body of the lens consists of two back-to-back fluidic adaptive lens chambers that sit either side of a glass substrate. To control the pressure, the researchers use a battery-powered miniature pump coupled to fluid inlet and outlet valves integrated within the chamber. In the design, where the lens can be changed between convex and concave in shape, the team has demonstrated the integration of a telephoto system and a wide-angle system using the same set of liquid lenses.

Changing lens shape enables optical zoom by adjusting focal point ratios for magnification. This approach doesn’t require mechanical motion and is implemented as a very compact module. Key innovations include a piezoelectric microfluidic device to pump fluid through micro channels into a spherical membrane. Resulting pressure deforms the membrane to change lens shape and focal point. Specialized membrane and fluid materials are incorporated within a simple design to ensure long product life and excellent lens characteristics. The miniature camera lens is capable of up to 5x optical zoom (without changing lens distance), focal distance tuning (f#: 0.7 to >100), wide range field-of-view tuning (7 – 65 degrees), and auto-focusing.

Rhevision says its approach produces images that are crisper and consistently better than those of competing technologies such as Varioptic’s electrowetting because of its superior aperture size and ability to admit sufficient light when photos are taken. Cost is far lower than competitors (under $3), the firm says, with good manufacturability and durability. When comparing Varioptic’s and Rhevision’s systems, however, Varioptic’s research director Bruno Berge believes that Varioptic’s main advantage is the electrowetting method that is used to focus and zoom. “Rhevision’s lens is easier to manufacture than ours,” he said. “It only has one liquid chamber, but it needs a pump to function. This can be large and slow and can take a lot of battery power. Our lens is harder to manufacture, but it only needs a small voltage to function.”

And so the race is on to see which of these approaches can get the market traction necessary to shut the window of opportunity for the other. At this point, Varioptic has a considerable head start. Join us at the Mobile Imaging Summit in Monterey, October 24 to see the latest advances in optics and opto-mechanics for Mobile Imaging, and judge for yourself who has the best solution. [Europe, North America, components]

Nokia Unveils 3.2MP, 3x Optical Zoom N93

(Future Image MIR Weekly – Issue #181, May 3, 2006)

Nokia last week took the wraps off the latest round of Nseries handsets, and the flagship N93 is loaded with multimedia goodness. The Nokia N93 features a 3.2-megapixel (2,048 x 1,536 pixels) camera with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 3x optical zoom lens, as well as up to 20x digital zoom, auto-focus and close-up mode. The N93 also offers DVD-like video capture — MPEG4 at 30 fps with stereo audio recording and digital stabilization. You can connect the N93 directly to your TV or upload your images and video to online albums or blogs. Nokia has made a deal with Yahoo so its new camera-phones can directly upload full-size photos to the Flickr photo-sharing site. Moreover, you can create high-quality home movies and burn them to DVD with the included Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 software (for Windows XP only, alas).

The Nokia N93 has an active camera toolbar that displays all available capture features, from exposure value to color tones and white balance. There are dedicated keys for shutter, zoom and flash and also a camera mode key that enables you to switch quickly between image and video capture. On the typical camera-phone, nearly all camera adjustments and controls are buried deep in nested menus and therefore rarely used, so we applaud these much-needed features. The phone features internal memory of up to 50 MB, which can be further expanded with a hot swappable miniSD card of up to 2 GB (a 128 MB card is included), allowing users to capture up to 90 minutes of high-quality video or close to 2,500 full resolution photos. The Nokia N93 includes a stereo FM radio and a digital music player as well as Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), Bluetooth 2.0, and USB 2.0 via Pop-Port interface and mass storage class support to support drag and drop functionality.

The handset echoes the Rubik’s cube design of the N92, but with a couple of refinements. The camera is still mounted in the hinge, which allows plenty of room for those lovely Zeiss optics, and the big 2.4-inch, QVGA, 262,144-color, 160°-viewing angle screen still rotates in multiple directions so you can use the phone like a regular clamshell, operate the camera pistol-style like a camcorder, or set it flat on a table with the screen in landscape orientation for browsing the web, watching video like a PMP or making hands-free video calls with the CIF (352 x 288) sub-camera, but the post around which it swivels is now at the other end of the hinge — near the zoom and shutter controls instead of the camera lens. There’s also a small 1.1-inch, 128 x 36-pixel, 65,536-color sub-display. All this functionality and versatility comes at a price, of course — an estimated, unsubsidized sales price of approximately €550 euros [almost $700 at today’s exchange rates] and, in this era of ever-slimmer phones, a rather bulky 118.2 x 55.5 x 28.2-mm, 180-gram package (twice as thick and twice as heavy as the Moto Razr V3c, for example). The N93 will be commercially available in July 2006.

With all the functionality being integrated into these devices, Nokia would like us to stop calling them camera-phones, or video-phones, or MP3-phones — or even phones — and instead refer to them as “multimedia computers.” While the point is well taken — these amazing electronic gizmos have gone way past being just phones or even hyphenated phones — the term “multimedia computer” doesn’t exactly resonate either. You already have a multimedia computer — it’s the Mac or Windows XP box on your desktop — and the term conveys neither the breadth of functionality nor the intensely personal nature of today’s mobile phones. Multimedia fails to communicate uses such as information management, barcode reading, or mobile wallet functions, to name just a few, and while the processing power in your hand is rapidly approaching that of yesterday’s desktop computer, that word is too cold and dry and businesslike to describe the indispensable consumer electronic device that you’ve tricked out with your favorite ringtones, ring-back tones, wallpapers, covers, holsters, skins, Swarovski crystals, and dangly bits of cuddliness and bling. Nominations are now open for a much needed, more marketable and catchier name. Send suggestions to [email protected]. [Europe, WPAN, WLAN, WWAN, handsets]