The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfect PDA Adam Turner © |
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How close have boffins come to delivering the perfect handheld device - an electronic personal assistant constantly by our side to meet our every need? Adam Turner pontificates. |
Sci-fi visionary Arthur C. Clarke outlined his concept of the ultimate Personal Digital Assistant - the "Minisec" - in his 1976 novel Imperial Earth; "The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what can fit comfortably in the human hand," Clarke wrote.
"At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use at the end of the twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile... Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode."
Looking around today, the Blackberry, iPhone and Google phone come closest to matching Clarke's 30 year-old vision. Such devices can trace their lineage back through the Palm Pilot, the Apple Newton, early pocket computers and the first portable calculators born of the microchip revolution. A wide range of modern portable devices have sprung up to meet the various needs of different users. Powerful smartphones such as the iPhone combine telecommunications with personal information management and entertainment. Tiny netbooks such as Asus' Eee PC offer a lightweight Keyboard, Video, Mouse interface for a traditional desktop interface, while Tablet PCs offer a large display but do away with the keyboard in favour of a stylus, touchscreen and basic voice commands.
Size matters
Even back in the 1970s, Clarke hit upon the greatest challenge to building such device - not processing power, heat, battery life or software but the physical interface. The need for a keyboard and screen limit how small you can make a device which is still user-friendly.
The way we'll escape the limitations of traditional interfaces is through voice-based interaction with our devices. In the 1960s Star Trek presented such a vision for the ship's computer, and sci-fi writers have continued to flesh out the concept for portable devices. Advances in voice recognition and natural language query will eventually let us do away with keyboards, and we're already seeing the beginnings of that on smartphones - with the recent release of Google Voice Search for the iPhone. The service struggles if you don't have a North American accent, but will quickly improve if voice recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking is anything to judge by. Once portable devices can easily understand our requests and offer spoken responses, it should be possible to do away with physical interfaces completely.
When combined with cloud computing, it's possible your personal "computer" could be no more than an earpiece or even an implant, letting you converse with your digital PA residing in cyberspace. Moving all the processing power and data storage into the cloud would remove the need for you to carry around fragile and expensive hardware. Google is again leading the way with its US-based 1-800-GOOG-411 service. You can ring the service from any phone, tell it where you are and what you're looking for - such as pizza delivery - and GOOG-411 will read back to you its search results and then put your call through to your pizza shop of choice.
A thousand words
While we're steadily moving towards voice-based interfaces, some information is still best presented visually. Today we rely on a handheld displays, but the future involves superimposing images on top of what we're already looking at - such as a fighter pilot's heads-up targeting display.
Such "augmented" reality has long been the stuff of science fiction, with tactical data superimposed on the vision of cyborgs such as Robocop and the Terminator. The most practical way to offer augmented reality today is via smartphones, such as the Mobilizy (http://www.mobilizy.com) travel guide service for the Google phone. Mobilizy lets you use a Google phone as a viewfinder at tourist destinations and have information about local landmarks appear on the screen. Such technologies will take off when Google Street View comes to the iPhone.
The next step will be to project images onto the inside of a pair of glasses, and such technology is already used to assist people with visual impairments. Your own personal heads-up display could be equipped with location tracking and accelerometers so it knows exactly what you're looking at. The glasses could integrate with
your Personal Digital Assistant to overlay driving directions, tourist information and perhaps a profile of someone you're speaking to along with notes from previous conversations.
In the long term, the possibility exists to project images directly onto the retina. Handheld organisers will be a thing of the past when your personal digital assistant can whisper in your ear and float in your vision. The future remains to be seen.
Note: Adam Turner© Permission to copy or quote extracts from this article may only be done with the written permission of the author.
Reprinted from the February 2009 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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