WiGig certification has begun -- in time for virtual/augmented reality

What we call "WiFi" today began at the National Cash Register company (NCR) with the development of a product to wirelessly connect point-of-sale terminals in stores. NCR took their design to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a professional society that defines standards. IEEE formed a committee, which issued their 802.11b and 802.11a wireless communication standards in 1999.

Standards enable competition and a number of companies began selling 802.11-compatible equipment. They also formed a trade association -- the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance -- to test and certify that their products met the IEEE standards and to market the concept of wireless local area networking. They soon changed the association name to the Wifi Alliance and coined the marketing term "WiFi."

As technology improved, new WiFi standards were invented -- 802.11a, b, g, n and ac.

This week, the WiFi Alliance began certifying compliance with the latest (though not the last) WiFi standard (802.11ad) and gave it the trade name "WiGig."

Each of these WiFi variants has different characteristics -- transmitting on different frequencies and using different methods of signalling whether a bit is a 1 or a 0. WiGig uses a much higher frequency than the others, which enables it to send data very fast -- at a gigabit per second or more -- with very low latency.

That is the good news. The bad news is that high frequency radio transmission travels short distances in air and loses power when passing through obstructions. WiGig will typically be used within rooms.

So, what are the WiGig use cases? The WiFi Alliance suggests these examples:

• Wireless docking between devices like smartphones, laptops, projectors, and tablets
• Simultaneous streaming of multiple, ultra-high definition videos and movies
• More immersive gaming, augmented reality and virtual reality experiences
• Fast download of HD movies
• Convenient public kiosk services
• Easier handling of bandwidth intensive applications in the enterprise

Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) is the most interesting to me.

First head-mounted AR/VR display

In 1965, Ivan Sutherland wrote a short note outlining a sci-fi vision of the Ultimate Display, which "with appropriate programming ... could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked." He proceeded to build an AR/VR prototype using a headset that was tethered to a computer.

That was fifty years ago. Today, we have low-quality AR/VR using our phones, but high resolution, fast AR/VR -- anything approaching Alice in Wonderland -- still requires tethering a head-mounted display to a computer.

Next year computers, smart phones and tablets with WiGig connectivity will be on the market. How about head-mounted AR/VR displays?

WiGig will enable untethered, high-performance AR/VR. A computer or an AR/VR appliance in the room will generate high definition, low latency video that the user sees in a relatively "dumb," light and comfortable headset or glasses and information from the headset and any controllers will be transmitted wirelessly back to the computer.

The untethered user will be free to move about the room and, since most of the computation will be off-loaded to the computer, the headset will not consume much power.

To put the possibility of untethered, high performance AR/VR in perspective, check out this this short video showing Sutherland's research prototype demonstration of very slightly augmented reality:

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Update 11/6/2016

Microsoft has demonstrated a relatively low cost, tethered head set that can track six degrees of freedom -- head up/down, head left/right and forward/backward in the room.

They say more details will be available in December and OEMs like Dell will be shipping product early next year starting at $299. The computing load is said to be low compared to the more expensive tethered virtual reality headsets on the market -- within the capability of a $500 PC.

Once WiGig is available, the tether will disappear and Microsoft will have a strong entry in the virtual reality market. They will also benefit from engineering synergy between this product and their untethered Hololens augmented reality product. (Some of the tracking technology was borrowed from the Hololens).

Google Glass -- why just capture reality when you can mediate and improve it?

There is a lot of hype surrounding wearable computing these days and Google Glass gets a lot of that attention with demonstrations of video and image capture and augmented reality, as shown in this video, which has been viewed over 16 million times.

But University of Toronto professor Steve Mann has been wearing electronic glasses and working with mediated reality for over 30 years. Mann differentiates between "augmented reality," where text or graphics are displayed over your normal vision and more general "mediated reality," in which vision is improved -- for example, detecting infrared radiation to see temperature differences, zooming in on distant objects, or extending the dynamic range of a photographic image by combining various exposures. He discussed these applications and more in an recent Techwise Conversations podcast interview.

Mann has pioneered mediated reality, but he is not alone in the field. For example, professor Gabby Sarusi and his colleagues at the at Ben Gurion University of the Negev are working on a nano layer coating for detecting infrared radiation in night vision goggles. Work on high dynamic range photography has also been with us for some time.

Journalists are beginning to report on initial experience with Google Glass prototypes and Google is fishing around for a killer app, but I suspect that Google Glass will turn out to be a niche product. We will not be wearing them 24-7, but some of us may put them on for special tasks -- like a surgeon entering the operating room.

That being said, research prototypes and high-value niche applications have a way of turning into ubiquitous, game-changing products, but it takes a while -- as you see in this photograph of Ivan Sutherland, inventor Sketchpad, the first object oriented computer graphics program, which he developed more than twenty years before MacDraw came out. (Ditto, any early prototype).

What about fifty years from now? Will Google Glass 2063 interface directly with the retina?

The FCC and Google want faster Internet access

After a year of public hearings and input via the Internet, the FCC has released their national broadband plan.

The FCC wants to bring 100 Mb/s download and 50 Mb/s upload speed to homes and 1 Gb/s to schools, hospitals and government buildings. They also advocate converting wireless spectrum used for TV broadcast to Internet access, with the goal of giving the US the fastest and most extensive wireless access in the world. They hope competition will lead to relatively cheap Internet access.

To put this in context, relatively low cost 100/50 Mb/s access is available in a number of cities and nations already.

More context -- Google plans to roll out 1 Gb/s fiber to between 50 and 500,000 homes in a test network.

Google hopes their test network will pressure on the FCC and the ISP industry to be more ambitious. Faster speeds mean a better Internet experience, which means more users and more Google ads. One hundred megabits per second sounds pretty good today, but it won't seem so fast in ten years.

They also hope to spur innovation. We have seen that researchers often develop applications for technology they expect to be available in the future. For example, Ivan Sutherland, shown here, built prototype image processing software with a graphical user interface in the early 1960s, using a very expensive computer. It was over twenty years before similar programs like MacDraw and AutoCad became economically viable.

Google hopes that, like Sutherland's expensive computer, their gigabit per second network will be used for new applications. They also hope to develop advanced technology for building fast networks.

How does 100 megabits per second compare to your current home Internet connectivity?

What sorts of applications would a gigabit per second connection enable?

Congress hoped to bring about competition and low prices for Internet access with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Did the act succeed in spurring competition and lowering prices?

Software refinement -- from research to products -- an image processing example

We have discussed the birth of image processing with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad program in the 1960s. As we see in this video, Sketchpad could draw, rotate, resize, copy and combine images.

Since Sutherland's research, there has been tremendous improvement in hardware technology and innumerable engineering refinements to image processing software.

Software refinements require research and the development of prototypes before they become product features. Consider, for example, the PatchMatch algorithm developed in collaboration between Princeton University and Adobe Systems. Here we see a paper describing the algorithm and some demonstration videos. The paper was presented and the videos shown at an academic engineering conference.

Successful research like the PatchMatch algorithm is subsequently incorporated into commercial products. Here you see a demonstration of tools that use PatchMatch for image retargeting, completion and reshuffling integrated into Adobe Photoshop. The tools are being demonstrated at a trade show, and it is probably safe to say they will be in the next version of Photoshop.

This is typical of engineering refinements to software. A prototype is developed in a research lab and it later becomes a product.

Researchers typically work on things that are too demanding for the technology of the day. Some of the Princeton videos are shown at 5 times actual speed because it takes time to compute the new images. By the time these features are released in Photoshop, hardware will have improved and they will execute rapidly.

Note that Sutherland's work was a pure university effort, but PatchMatch was a joint effort between a university and a company. Many significant advances have come from industrial research labs. Can you find some interesting prototypes and projects at Microsoft Research?