Consumers drive content, as hardware takes back seat to apps

Consumers drive content, as hardware takes back seat to apps

Mobile devices that conform to environment, cloud computing, and TV-on-demand are reshaping design

BY GREG LUPION

Are you finding the boxing match one-sided and tedious? Click off it and switch to the Velodrome to watch the cycling competition. It’s 2012, and you might be sitting in your living room watching TV, but you have become your own command center for the London Summer Olympics. By then, it’s possible you will be able to select the event, venue, and even camera angle. If you tire of the aerial view of cyclists winding around the track, push a button to see a close-up of their feet pedaling furiously.

“We will have the ability to watch it all on demand. Cameras will have to be everywhere, and they will need to be smarter,” said Brent Przybus, director of product marketing at San Jose, CA-based Xilinx and a computer engineer. He described the design challenges to menu-driven TV-on-demand. The viewer’s menu selection would be fed into a server, which would connect with the specific camera being requested. Cameras would have to be positioned at numerous events from different perspectives. Beyond that, the requirements would include connectivity, high-resolution video, and power efficiency. And the cameras must be smart. To keep up with the requests from the server, Przybus noted, communications requirements would have to be met. “And it all must be done in real time,” he added.

Tim Sweeney, founding partner of Austin, TX-based Upstream Thinking, agreed that you could run 10 cameras through a server. “But the finite user control elements, such as pan or zoom, would be a tough design challenge to overcome when millions may be sharing control,” said Sweeney, a mobile device designer who founded Upstream about two years ago as an innovation company that creates new ecosystems of products, services, and brands.

The overarching question is whether to do something just because it’s doable. Sweeney wonders whether the ability to offer multiple camera angles would become a meaningful experience for the user, and would it rise above the viewing experience that TV networks currently offer? He did see the value in offering the option of switching among simultaneously played events.

The Summer Olympics provides one example of consumers’ insatiable appetite to be connected and to be fed information and entertainment. Consumers want to be connected everywhere and through increasingly smart devices. That makes power management a critical design consideration. The physical device is becoming fundamentally unimportant, amid the rush to create applications in an environment dominated by cloud computing and new software. Even the ability to reconfigure the form factors of devices to heighten the user experience will become possible. As a result, mobile devices would not need to be replaced quite as often; instead, the user would be able to update them.

“The magic number for a mobile appliance, be it a smart phone or a tablet, is the media application,” said Pallab Chatterjee, an independent design engineer based in Livermore, CA, about 30 miles northeast of San Jose. “You have to be able to charge your device in the morning, commute for about 45 minutes, have your workday or school day, and then have another 45 minutes on the commute back. That means you need full playback for 90 minutes. Typically, you need standby and the intermittent 30% duty cycle.” (Duty cycle is defined as the time that a device must be fully awake and functioning.) A smart phone typically reaches that 30% level, Chatterjee noted.

Whether you’re toting a tablet PC, a smart phone, or the new Nintendo 3DS gaming platform, “you don’t want to take chargers and accessories to work or school,” Chatterjee said. That’s why the environment was designed around a 10-hour duty cycle. The architecture of the chip differs from that used to power a small set-top box because the latter plugs into the wall. The set-top box requires higher-performance parts because the data environment is larger. By contrast, watching a movie on the 3-inch screen of a cell phone calls for only 240 x 160 resolution, which falls just below standard definition (SD). “You don’t need 2,000 x 2,000 resolution.

“You can have a mobile device with five processors, running off a battery, but you need advanced power management ICs,” Chatterjee said. “In the same combo in a game console, you don’t need to worry about the power management.”

Sweeney said, “There are certain break points where the size can become too big for the mobile device to be accepted — a 7-inch mobile device has had difficulty finding market acceptance. You ideally want to stay near the volume or size of the iPhone or Droid.” Because it is undesirable to increase the size of the battery, the switching logic at the board level becomes an important design consideration, he said.

What’s your power factor? What’s your application? The answers to those questions are driving chip design. For mobile handsets, reducing the power and building a 32 to 45-nm chip could cost about $50 million to build, Chatterjee said. “The small guys can’t play.” So, the need to deliver connectivity has pushed up the entry cost.

In the past, devices could be categorized as belonging to either the home or workplace. Now, a wave of intermediary devices has reached the market. Gaming consoles and home theaters provide an active experience at home, while conventional TV is passive. “People between 12 and 30 engage in simultaneous connectivity,” said Chatterjee . “Merely watching TV is insufficient for them. People over 30 watch TV with friends or significant others. But younger people watch TV with some kind of social connection Facebook, Twitter or Skype. These people are mobile. They don’t have big-screen TVs.”

Regardless of your age, the TV has become a focal point for information processing. “People are changing their commercial watching habits,” Chatterjee said. “This dramatically changes the feature set. Most set-top boxes have hard drives and multiple tuners. They want to keep you in the same room on the same screen, so you can look on the Internet or chat with someone.”

With connectivity so ubiquitous, the physical device has taken a back seat to the application. “Brand equity has shifted from physical to virtual,” said Tim Morton, design manager at Product Development Technologies, in Austin, TX.

Increasingly, designers will be asked to build devices that become personalized to the user. “At some point, we may not have a physical device because the access will be everywhere,” Morton said. The device would be connected to its most immediate environment, and it would be smart enough to know what’s around it and what the user will do with it, he explained. The challenge would lie in developing the software to exploit the technology. “The device should know that at this time of day, the user likes to do X,” Morton said. “The need is for a more personal understanding, and the technology is there for that.”

In the next 10 years, consumers will seek access as opposed to ownership, Sweeney said, citing that trend as a major reason he launched Upstream. Because of cloud computing, devices will become a portal to the human network, Sweeney said. “People are defining themselves by their associations and where they plug into that network.”

Sweeney agrees with Morton that devices must be flexible enough to modify themselves to suit the user. “Ultimately the desire is to have one device,” he said. “If you are going to a grocery store in the future, and you’re in the produce aisle, data may be pushed to you about the produce: its freshness, where it was shipped from, etc. There might be ratings on food or packaged goods.” So, if you were interested in produce, the question would be: How do you input information in real time? “All these connections are made in the cloud.”

With consumers creating content to inform fellow consumers, “companies will lose control of information flow,” Sweeney said. What role would a mobile device play in this new ecosystem, in which the people who control the bandwidth (that is, the network and the cloud) are calling the shots?

“In 10 years, you may have a device that will have a different interface depending on whether you are at work, at play, or at your kid’s recital,” Sweeney said. “Perhaps in my lifetime, you will see devices that change form factor to adapt to the environment. The gaming industry is a great reference for mobile devices because they often find applications for new technologies first.”

In Sweeney’s vision, the physical device would not have to be replaced every few years. Mobile devices would be modular, allowing consumers to configure their own devices. “You dump out a lot of the computing capability because that’s in the cloud,” he said. “You have more sensor capability, which allows for ‘smart’ self-organizing interfaces.” The design hurdle, he noted, is to make these devices simple to use in a complex environment and ensure meaningful information is delivered to and received from users.

In today’s mobile market, multiple devices and different manufacturers too often deliver the same user experience, Morton said, citing the recently launched Windows 7 phone array.

“Overkill is a good definition of much of the consumer stuff,” said Jerry Durand, who with his wife co-founded Durand Interstellar in 1981. The Los Gatos, CA, company’s designs range from inexpensive entertainment and audio equipment through medical, control, telecom, aerospace, pyro and test systems. “You have all this computing power available. Do you really need a 1-GHz processor for something in your pocket?

“Everything has to be the 99 cents application. People whip out their iPhone at every opportunity, whether you need it or not. As college students are showing, you are getting a group of people who cannot solve a problem unless there is a YouTube video showing how to do it.” ■