Philips Research - Technologies

Converting dreams into real experience

 

How ´ambient intelligence´ will enhance our experience of everyday life

In World News 8.4, Stephano Marzano, managing director of Philips Design, talked about the challenge of finding new opportunities that will influence the shape our future.

In this article, World News talks to another of Philips' key figures, Emile Aarts, head of New Media Systems & Applications at Philips Research. Emile Aarts task is to turn visions of the future into everyday reality. Ambient intelligence is fast becoming one of these realities.


What is ambient intelligence?

Emile Aarts describes ambient intelligence as the integration of technology into our environment, so that people can freely and interactively utilize it. In concrete terms, ambient intelligence is provided by a large number of small, intelligent devices, ´in-built´ into our surroundings. These devices have three important characteristics: they can be personalized, they are adaptive and they are anticipatory.

"A personalized device allows people to change its behaviour to suit their own individual wishes, like changing the preferred TV channel or adjusting the display colour," Aarts explains. "It requires a conscious decision. Adaptivity means that activity is also tailored to individual needs, but in this case behaviour is recorded and the activity automatically adapts to your preferences. For example, your TV would come to ´know´ your favourite programmes and automatically record them for you." The advantages are apparent: less wasted time for adjustment. "The anticipatory nature of these devices means that actions can be anticipated from a profile of the user which is created from observed behaviour," Aarts continues. "Since your requirements can then be anticipated, the system will suggest programmes you might want to see."


Separating function from the box

A TV set is just a ´black box´ with two signals in, video and power, and two signals out, images and sound. But we can actually separate the functionality from the box. Except for the screen - which could be any flat surface - all processing can easily be done elsewhere. It becomes a hidden ´virtual´ device that we must be able to interact with.

How will this work? The important point about interaction with distributed, hidden virtual devices is that it must happen in a natural way. "The required interaction between people and machines must become social, based on the same principle as between people. We must make it possible to interact with systems naturally, using gesture, smell, body language, touch and speech. It´s what people intuitively want. Look at how they currently talk to their computers!"

Another issue has been raised about today´s computer user interface, which uses the mouse as the pointing device. Aarts says: "In an ambient intelligence system, you won´t need a mouse. You will be the pointing device of the future!"




The networked home

"The concept of electronic home networking is not in itself new; we have been working towards it for some time. Philips Research has a long history in the evolution of consumer electronics. Over the last 90 years, the company began with bulbs and tubes, and then developed components, from which they moved into systems, and then into functions. Now, we are moving into the new world of functions separated from the boxes - as witnessed by our latest patents like Incredible Sound and Natural Motion. The future scenario for ambient intelligence incorporates computing functions into the walls of our homes and the fabric of our lives.

"The networked home will consist of clusters of embedded devices with a user interface that is an extension of our natural movements, through touch panels, heat and weight sensors, and 'intelligent' cameras with eyeball tracking, for example. Simply looking at something and speaking a command will be enough to activate it. We already have vision systems that can track eyeball movement. Simply by looking at Chicago on a flat screen display of the world we could find out local statistics, the weather or flight information - whatever we wanted to know." ´Ubiquitous computing´ is a novel architecture that supports this vision.

"These technologies are already being researched in Philips. Networking their functions in the home will ultimately mean interconnecting them so that the individual is freed from cumbersome input and operation tasks, and is presented with information associated with everyday tasks. We will be able to access the information we need and want much more easily, naturally and quickly - literally ´in the blink of an eye´!"


Three times more productivity - or three times more freedom?

What Aarts and the Philips Research computer science team are proposing to achieve with ambient intelligence is different from what most of the ICT (Information & Communication Technology) world is trying to achieve! The usual aim is increased productivity. Three times what we now achieve is generally believed to be possible. But as Aarts sees it, that also means that we could do the same as we do now in a third of the time - and since the trend in (western) society is to trade-in working hours in favour of more free time for experiences - this fits in with our vision of ambient intelligence.


The ´experience economy´ business model

The idea behind the ´experience economy´ is simple. Essentially, it works like this. Trading started with ´commodities´ - say coffee beans. Someone realized that coffee beans could be roasted and packaged - that we could add value and create ´products´. Of course, the sales price per unit then goes up. The next step was to provide ´services´: pour hot water on ground coffee and serve it - and again prices per unit rise. The next step is to provide ´experiences´ - serve the coffee in an exotic ambience at an even higher price.

According to Aarts, it is obviously true that experiences are marketable: just look at how much people spend on holidays, for the sake of experience. "With ambient intelligence, we can provide experiences in the home. With windows as flat screens as well as transparency, you can have a view of the beach, even from the twentieth floor of a New York apartment block!"

Experiences are always real, even if generated by something virtual. It's similar to how we use personal recollection. We take photographs, for instance, to share with others later and recall the events. But we still need to make relevant associations. We could have large storage devices for all our electronic photos and a smart system that is capable of displaying them, but because the material is in the system, not physically available, there's still a need for a trigger.



This is where ambient intelligence could provide an interactive ´experience´ that goes much further than visual stimulation. Aarts envisages a souvenir with a tag in it, for example, that links to images and information related to holiday experience. The souvenir placed in front of the system immediately recalls all the related pictures and information, perhaps local food recipes or current news events. Images of people you knew would trigger suggestions from the system of other events and pictures in which they appear. Equally, homes equipped with ambient intelligence could automatically collect images of visitors and associate them with previously recorded visits. Your system would ´remind´ you of events when the same person was present. Your associations are quickly and easily retrieved.


A shift in TV

A current shift in broadcasting demonstrates how interested people are in participative experience. An example is the Dutch reality TV programme 'Big Brother'. There is no script, no story to be told. People simply interact with each other - and millions watch, simply for the experience. Many people are starting to make and broadcast their own material on the Internet, so that they can see and be seen in 'connected communities'. In TV, technology already enables us to compose our own programmes from different video streams. We can observe a game from different vantage points in a sports stadium, or choose specific tennis players to follow, rather than watching games selected for ´mainstream´ broadcasting. We can go back to re-view something - effectively going back in time. Ambient intelligence systems go even further. They 'know' the viewer's profile (their 'D'ego' or digital ego) and make an automatic selection. The players, the viewing angle, the replays you want are presented, without you having to select them manually each time.


Interoperability and transparency

One of the most important research and development projects for ambient intelligence is the interoperability of a communications network. One example of interoperability is the IEEE 1394- based HAVi (Home Audio Video interoperability) standard that has been developed by a consortium of consumer electronics manufacturers, including Philips. The standard ensures that a new TV set with this standard, for example, would be added to your system and ´intelligently´ incorporated into the system, without the necessity for additional programming or resetting. Devices on a HAVi network can even share functionality.

Ambient intelligence is also characterized by its transparency. Transparency means that the interconnected embedded systems are invisible, because they are actually incorporated into objects, or ´painted´ onto them. Examples of use are T-shirts that respond to body heat and give feedback as to heart- and pulse-rate for athletes or keep-fit enthusiasts; or alarm activators embedded in clothing that alert security systems in case of aggressive attack. The technology underlying such inventions is ´silicon on anything´, in which programmable silicon is applied directly to the existing environment, rather than contained in a separate ´black box´. Virtual devices, indeed.


We are the missing link!

Virtual devices use virtual software. So how does this affect our audio and video ´collections´ such as cassettes or CDs? We already have the memory technology for ´virtual´ rather than physical collections, with hundreds of hours of visual and audible information (programmes, software, or music) stored in the system. However, this introduces interesting social/behavioural considerations. We're accustomed to keeping collections on shelves. Will we not want to actually have things ´in hand´? And will we be able to trust ambient intelligence to store all the things we want? Aarts believes we will overcome these natural inhibitions over time, pointing to how we handle money as an example. 250 years ago, people stored their wealth at home, in gold. Then came banks, where they could store this visible, tangible wealth in a vault. This was replaced with paper money, representations of an amount somewhere, in a bank. Now we use digital transactions with plastic cards; we no longer need to touch money. It´s a question of trust. When it comes to accessing our collections, the simple solution could be a virtual collection with visual representations of the music or films or whatever.



Do we want to go this far?

Aarts points out that the technology is already available to turn ambient intelligence into reality. But he also emphasizes that there are ethical issues that need to be addressed. We should first think whether we would like to have real ambient intelligence systems. There are obvious matters like protection of privacy. But there are also considerations like will the ambient system ´learn´ things about you that may differ from how you envisage yourself? In a way, it could be seen as a threat. If the electronics are invisible and anticipate your behaviour, would they take over tasks you prefer to do yourself, without first asking for it? Do we want that?

Clearly, ambient technology doesn´t only embody behavioural changes but it is also brings ethical responsibilities. Just like all technological breakthroughs, ambient intelligence must be used within the boundaries of social expectations. How far we go must be the decision of society as a whole. The responsibility of computer scientists like Emile Aarts and his team is ensuring that consumers´ needs and wishes are turned into a reality we can all value and enjoy.