The futuresque communications previously only envisioned by StarTrek’s writers are reality in the here and now as demonstrated at PCS ’96 by students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, in conjunction with Motorola Inc.
The communications technology projects exhibited by MIT use Motorola’s FLEX family of data transmission protocols.
“The FLEX family is enabling a tremendous amount of new applications,” said Jim Page, director of marketing, FLEX operations in Motorola’s Messaging Systems Product Group.
As a corporate sponsor of the MIT Media Lab, Motorola provides full funding for seven of the lab’s graduate students. Four students attended the Personal Communications Industry Association annual trade show.
“The implication of this relationship is that a premiere company that has cornered wireless messaging is cornering the smartest students in the world,” said Page. The “projects are about the world of the future, and of course wireless is a large part of that world.”
In the words of Alvin Toffler, the United States is moving into the third wave, an “information-based digital world,” said Page.
“Wireless is becoming a fundamental driver of the way we doing business,” he continued.
Some innovations produced through the lab will remain proprietary, while others will be shared with the industry and other educational institutions, noted Page.
Underscoring much of MIT Media Lab’s work in wireless is the concept of personal area networks, in which individuals carry a portable device.
One project exhibited by MIT showed how a pager could easily connect with a larger keyboard of a computer, so a two-way messaging user has more typing flexibility than with a belt-top size messaging device like Tango.
Page said technology allows the human body itself, which is surrounded by an electromagnetic field, to conduct information between two sources. Today we use wires, modems or wireless modems, said Page. Why not your arms and legs?
He noted, however, a commercial application based on human conductivity between devices won’t be available anytime soon.
One key motive behind creating personal wireless technologies is enhancing communications between individuals. An example is the interactive pager. Page said to imagine if Tango users programmed into their pager a set amount of personal information they wished to reveal about themselves. A continual pulse would reach out to other Tango users wishing also to communicate. Users could narrow the field of communications by specifying users by name. If by chance one weekend two friends unknowingly visit the same town, one pager could notify the other. By the same token, users could program their pagers to “hide” from certain people or networks.
The concept of vision information storage, displaying an interface similar to a computer screen on one side of a person’s eyeglasses, is being developed in the MIT Media Lab, explained Page. This technology would allow “you to hold a conversation as you are passively reading the display.”
One challenge in paging faced by the MIT Media Lab, which is a traditional paging problem, is that transmission of information into and out of the device becomes more difficult as devices become smaller, said Page.
The MIT-Motorola personal use wireless projects have been going on about a year, said Page.
