Some major recent innovations have made it easier for people to interact with machines. Nintendo's motion-sensing Wii and Apple's touch screen iPod have captured the popular imagination, but many challenges remain. Even the iPhone lacks an easy way to type messages. Users hate its touch screen keyboard as much as they hate tiny keys and number pads.
The Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone, which brought touch screens to the masses, demonstrated how much consumers want better user interfaces.
The Texas Instruments Developer Conference, which opened Tuesday at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, demonstrated some amazing possibilities.
The annual event also provided a launch pad for new chips from the Dallas-based company and a showcase for innovative TI (NYSE: TXN) customers.
"I'm more excited today, looking forward at the innovations coming in the next five or 10 years, than I have been in my 25 years with this company," said Mike Hames, TI's senior vice president for applications specific products.
Expanding Interface Possibilities
Some major recent innovations have made it easier for people to interact with machines. Nintendo's motion-sensing Wii and Apple's touch screen iPod have captured the popular imagination, but many challenges remain.
Even the iPhone lacks an easy way to type messages. Users hate its touch screen keyboard as much as they hate tiny keys and number pads.
A company at the conference called "CandleDragon" thinks it has an easier way to enter text on cellphones, a pen that transfers your scribbling to the screen. Users can save the images or send them as e-mails or instant messages.
CandleDragon, which is based in suburban Boston, thinks its base product will appeal to everyone who hates typing on cell phones, which means pretty much everyone.
A more advanced model will target artists, architects, engineers and other visually oriented people. This artist's tool will let users make elaborate drawings on paper and send them to computer monitors.
"A pen in the hand feels natural. It allows your thoughts to flow freely," said Arkady Pittel, the company CEO. "These products won't just save time, they'll improve the quality of your work."
Without Saying a Word
CandleDragon's smart pens, which should come out later this year, face stiff competition from voice recognition programs, Unfortunately, neither technology can help folks who can neither speak clearly nor move precisely.
Logic says it's difficult to give such severely disabled people the power to communicate effectively or control machinery. However, an Illinois company called "Ambient" says it can do both.
Ambient, which amazed developers last year with a thought-controlled wheelchair, showed off another improbable device Tuesday morning.
CEO Michael Callahan managed to have a cell phone conversation with Hames without ever speaking aloud. Ambient's system sensed what he wanted to say, and an electronic voice read it aloud.
This new technology, like the wheelchair system before it, detects the impulses your brain sends your throat when you imagine yourself speaking.
"There are about 60 million people worldwide, 3 million of them in the U.S., who either can't talk at all or who have severe speaking limitations," Callahan said. "This system is going to change their lives."
Using current technology, the system takes several seconds to convert thought to word, and users must limit their vocabulary.
Faster chips and other improvements should boost performance by year's end, however, when Ambient plans to bring the system to market.
The Future of OMAP
TI customers such as Ambient constantly demand better products, which TI delivered Tuesday when it unveiled a new line of OMAP processors.
The cores inside the new OMAP chips pack four times the performance of their predecessors. More power means more capability, and TI thinks the chips will let customers invent entirely new products -- products that combine audio, video, sensors and wireless communications in nearly any conceivable way.
TI has long predicted a big market for its chips in medical, automotive and security devices. The new line could help make those predictions come true.
The most basic of the four chips will go on sale in the second quarter.
The other three will follow in the second half of the year. Improvements to these original designs will probably come shortly after that, as TI shrinks the size of these chips.
Slacker Shapes Up
TI said it is working with about 100 customers to design products around the new chips, but the company would not name any of the customers or speculate about product sales.
One possible user is Slacker, an Internet company that can send custom radio "stations" to listeners with handheld receivers that cost US$200 to $300.
Slacker, which is based in San Diego, already uses older OMAP chips inside its portable radios, but it would like to add features that will require more processing power.
"We'd certainly like to bring video to this device," said Patrick Markle, Slacker's director of partner applications. "The goal is to keep improving what we offer."