Yu Centrik

Here’s a quick summary of some more presentations from the EuroITV conference:

* The use of TV as a reminder system for seniors’ medication (Brazil). Not that crazy of an idea.
* A panel on the impact of Internet on the traditional TV remote.  The panel moved a bit strangely.  Each presenter advocated an idea, one after another on the future of TV (the TV guide is dying, the future is in placeshifting, quality content is king, etc.).
* User expectations in terms of self-identification on interactive TV (for a personalized experience). A study was presented on the acceptability of different interaction modes on televisions in Austria. Strangely, fingerprint identification proved to be the users’ favorite …?
* A comparative study between a traditional remote control and a remote touchpad: the two remotes are more or less equal in terms of error rate, but the touchpad requires a lot more user movement.  The author concludes by stating his opinion that these remotes are destined to become popular in 5 years time, when touch interfaces become the majority.

* Recommendations: Because there’s so much content, specialists are calling for the television timetable to be replaced by intelligent recommender systems. A researcher presented an interesting overview of problems with recommender systems. One challenge is the notion of time; it is difficult to make good recommendations at first, as there would be no initial user data (implicit profiling).  He continued to present a method to optimize this element, a bit complex ..  On the same topic, another author has summarized his study on the use of recommendation software for Youtube videos as a Facebook application.  Their system uses a method combining both subjective measures and explicit judgements (user ratings of movies) and objective measurement (automated analysis of listening habits - eg playing time of a video, kind of the most popular videos, etc..). The system indicates that explicit and implicit data seem to converge, and that this combined approach is promising.  However, the majority of participants indicated they would not continue with the experiment afterward, as they judged it too demanding…

I recently returned from a month-long foray through India.  As the country from which both of my parents immigrated to Canada, the trip was enlightening in many ways.  Among the countless revelations lay a few economic and technological insights which I thought might interest our readers.  Are you a global traveler?  These thoughts are obviously anecdotal and I welcome your comments from your own experiences in other parts of the world.

While the major cities of India have become increasingly “westernized” and the country’s reputation as a hotbed for technology grows, the proliferation of technology has reached beyond the cities into rural villages and remote farmland.  Let me paint you a picture: imagine a young indian farmhand, shirtless, his legs draped in a cloth dress.  He’s riding one of his family’s bulls, slowly bringing it to the other side of the village.  He’s got a stick in one hand, which he’s using to whack the bull for navigation, and a cellphone in the other.  Despite my limited understanding of the language, he’s clearly discussing farm work.  This was a bold image I witnessed first-hand on a rural farm village in northeastern India.  This is a sugar plantation with no consistent residential electricity, no water pipes or hot water, and two small mobile phone towers.

The third world is collectively skipping 100 years of technological development.  While we painstakingly iterated from basic gas-guzzling cars, rotary phones and vaccuum tube computers to the current technological world, the fruits of our advance have globalized.  This child went from having no phone or communication lines whatsoever, directly to a mobile phone.  In the near future, I can imagine these third-world children engaging with technologies that access e-mail and web browsing (perhaps the iPad is a step in this direction as a simplified internet interface?).  Many talk of the “digital divide” as an emerging problem in our already-imbalanced world.  I would argue that this gap is destined to be filled through the globalization of our most modern, efficient and cheap technologies.

What does internet access mean to rural villages and third-world citizens?  Despite attempts to create structured and organized education systems (I visited several rural Indian schools), there is a clear lack of dedicated teachers with international-level skill and knowledge.  However, stories of intelligent people emigrating out of the third world have spawned a generation of young rural kids with intelligence and a passion for education which is simply unparalleled in the developed world.

The fire I saw deep in the eyes of an 8-year-old village girl who studies english and biology textbooks twelve hours a day of her own volition is a testament.  Her clear and firm intention to “become a doctor and move abroad” is in stark contrast to what interests the 8-year-olds I’ve met in the developed world.  Her smooth conversation with me in a self-taught english represents a calculated move from her remote village to the world stage.

As mobile technology develops and these young rural children get access to the wealth of information on the internet, it seems possible that this feverish appetite for education will be satisfied through self-directed learning.  The untapped potential of the intelligent-yet-uneducated workers I met at the nearby sugar mill could cease to be a reality with the advent of information technology.   Especially in the midst of this past decade’s collapse, the economic implications of a techno-savvy, self-educated and passionate third world are astounding.

How can we prepare for this onslaught of new talent?  First of all, the selfish question: how can we stay competitive by highlighting what makes our skills and experiences unique?  More importantly, how can we alter our economic systems and requirements to evaluate and embrace these talented people, knowing that they might be able to help solve major global problems despite not having an official degree or diploma?

On its official blog, Google has recently announced the production of a new, lightweight, simplified operating system:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

To commemorate the occasion, I thought I would vocalize my stance on what operating systems today are missing, and how Google might be able to fill that hole.

Macs have a reputation of providing smooth, sleek and usable interfaces.  Linux is well-known as a base for full customizability: tech-savvy users can build their own machine’s architecture.  Windows has many reputations, good and bad, which place it somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.  The spectrum lies between offering a practical solution to many of life’s problems and offering the techno-philic an opportunity to customize and create a machine that works to their exact specifications.  The implied question asks whether we are stuck with many different operating systems, each tailored to a different point on this gradient.  Are we doomed to segregation?  Is our technological future littered with incompatibility and a lack of standard?

Technological development may seem divergent, but it’s not too late to move in the right direction.  Operating systems started with cryptic, technical command prompts and eventually evolved to the smooth, intuitive GUIs we know today.  However, the answer is not to simply shove a system’s implementation model behind the scenes in favour of creating a usable mental model, but instead to allow users a practical interface which implicitly builds a foundation of systemic understanding.  Put simply, we are oversimplifying our operating systems so much that, to the laymen of the next generation, computers are considered mere ‘tools’.

The ideal situation is to build a system where users’ practical needs are met while they also enjoy the experience of learning the system.  If done well, their desire for enjoyment will develop into a curiousity which will eventually manifest an urge to explore the system as its own entity (and not just a tool)!  At this point, users begin to form an intimate understanding the true potential of technology to solve problems in all fields (something i learned tinkering with my first DOS machine as a child).  Google is working on a simple OS which seems useful for specific contexts, but I’m skeptical to consider minimalism as the future.  If they, or anyone else, can create a practical and usable operating system while simultaneously accommodating a transparency which engages curiousity and promotes ‘tinkering’, I believe it would be a step in the right direction: toward a unified, practical and educational technology.

I consider this concept as an example of inclusive design as it focuses on generating systems which include all users in the long-term iterative design process.  On the generational time-scale, an operating system which encourages tinkering is providing the next generation with the tools it needs to continue progress.  An inclusive system elegantly solves your general problems while inherently teaching you how to design your own unique solutions in the future.  One part Mac, one part Linux, and a whole lot of hope for the next generation.

I wrote up a brief report on the EuroITV conference, held in Leuven, Belgium from 3 to 5 June, where Jay Vidyarthi and I presented.  The conference focused on the state of technological advance but also consumption trends guiding the TV of tomorrow.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the paradigm of television as we know it will drown, or at least significantly evolve.

We know that very few people use interactive functions on their digital television system apart from the program guide and access to show information.  This lack of interest comes from multiple sources: applications not suited for viewers (more passive, watch in groups), outdated design features, competing with higher technologies (computers, game consoles), limited interaction with the remote.  Many of these obstacles will be overcome soon.

The results of almost all ethnographic studies presented at Euro ITV showed users glued to their TV in a state of relax, escaping extraneous effort.  Developers must consider this aspect in application design.  For example, configuration, settings, and preferences must be minimized, or even shifted to the computer to facilitate more complex interaction (an interface which is psychologically associated with more effort, as well).  The paradigm shift in TV consists largely of the intelligent distribution of interaction between different media (television, computers and Internet, mobile) in a way which takes strengths and weaknesses of each technology into account.  The good news is that this concept now seems to be well understood by the industry.

Great strides have been made in the electronic program guides, simplifying life for TV users. Imagine you turned on your TV one night, tired after a hard day, and it offers a schedule which truly takes account of your taste and context (”it’s Friday, nothing too serious, please.”).  No longer do we need to go sift through a convoluted show schedule.  This will be possible thanks to a smart grid based on the system building a model of you (or your whole family) powered by external data (eg. social networking websites), implicit behavioural data (setting reminders, recording shows, searching content, etc.) and explicit assessments (assessing a film after watching it).  A promising solution in an era of content proliferation where searching for a good shows is becoming more and more of a challenge.

On the other hand, some purely technological developments suggest that the TV of tomorrow might come sooner than we think.  Now that progress in image quality has plateaued, and public expectations have been largely surpassed by available technologies, the hunt begins for other selling points.  TV manufacturers are beginning to incorporate downloadable features to televisions (i.e. installing “Widgets” directly to the system), as has been the case for smart phones for about a year.  Imagine, for example, access to latest Facebook posts, your local weather or the weekly news on demand with a single button on the remote.

According to Rich Ezekiel from Yahoo! Connected TV, who gave an opening keynote devoted to explaining Yahoo! TV’s concept of “Widgets”, 90% of televisions manufactured in 2010 may be connected to the Internet and download such mini-applications.

Remotes are changing, too.  Some models incorporate more and more features to provide greater interaction, such as motion detection and retractable keyboards.  Soon, it might be possible soon to navigate through menus using gestures (like the Nintendo Wii) instead of pressing standard buttons on the remote.

It seems that all the pieces are in place for the advent of SmartTV: not only a mature technology, but also a clearer representation of what people really expect from their televisions.