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).

Communicating emotion and presence -- from a Hole in Space to Cuba's public-access hotspots

How about a Hole in Space between Havana and Miami? Between Jerusalem and Gaza City?


Cuba, one of the least connected nations in the world, has recently created 35 public-access, WiFi hotspots around the island. While 35 hotspots is a drop in the bucket, this opening is a start and it has been noted in many articles and blog posts.

Miami Herald photo

Most of the coverage of the new hotspots has been lackluster and redundant, but an article in yesterday's Miami Herald stands out because it stresses the human and emotional impact of these access points. The article describes people showing a new baby, a woman talking with her husband in Miami or a little boy telling his father he loves him. Baruch College Professor and Cuba scholar Ted Henken is quoted in the article as saying:

Cubans are living out some of their most personal moments — family reunions and introductions to new babies and spouses — not in the intimacy of their own homes but in public plazas and parks.

Raúl can relax -- the people are using the Internet to communicate with loved ones, not to organize political rallies.

This reminds me of an often overlooked, pioneering project. In 1980, artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created a "Hole in Space" by connecting larger-than-life displays in New York and Los Angeles with a satellite feed. It was the mother of all video chats, demonstrating that electronic communication could convey presence and emotion.

Check out the following five-minute excerpt from a video documenting the event:



If you liked that, watch the full half-hour video:



Hole in Space was created more than a decade before we saw the first, simple version of the World Wide Web and Rabinowitz and Galloway were artists, not computer scientists. Products begin with a vision. In this case, Rabinowitz and Galloway had the vision and built the engineering prototype demonstrating its value. As the saying goes "demo or die."

Hole in Space was only one of their projects. For an overview of a quarter century of Rabinowitz and Galloway's work, see the Electronic Cafe International archival Web site.

Today, video conferencing is ubiquitous -- it has even reached Cuba -- but our video chats are on small screens. I'd love to see "Hole in Space, 2015," using today's technology. Large, public advertising displays are common and they can be linked over the Internet. Wouldn't it be cool to punch a lot of holes in space?

Where would you put the displays? For a start, how about one between Gaza City and Jerusalem or between Havana and Miami? Kickstarter anyone?

Are the new Roku radios less sensitive than the old ones?

I had an old Roku XD in my bedroom but, when Roku added PBS, it turned out their programs were incompatible with my XD. (The explanation of the incompatibility is interesting in its own right -- See this discussion and this post from Roku for the details).

I had gotten my money's worth out of that old Roku and also wanted the remote headphone feature and faster processor in the newer Roku 3, so ordered one.

When it arrived, I installed it and settled back to watch TV, but it went through the menus more slowly than the old XD had and I began seeing pauses for buffering, which I had never seen with the XD.

I checked the signal strength using inSSIDer and saw that it vacilated around -60 dBm as shown in this two minute sample:

It was not robust, but the old Roku XD had functioned well with that signal -- could the new Roku radio be less sensitive than the old one?

I had been meaning to return my ISP's WiFi router/radio, so I purchased a new one and was happy, but surprised, to discover that the Roku 3 worked well with it. I checked the signal strength with the new router/radio and found that it was more stable over time:

and, as shown in this overlay, a little bit stronger:

Neither is a "five bar" signal, but my old Roku works with either. I may have gotten a bad Roku 3 (Roku is willing to exchange it, but that would leave me without TV for a week or so) or it may be that the radio in the newer model is less sensitive.

Regardless, it would be helpful if radio sensitivity were included in product specs and reviews -- by Roku and any other WiFi device manufacturer.

iPad WiFi is poor

My wife just got an iPad – the first tablet in our house.  It was not easy to get it away from her, but last night I managed to take the iPad to bed.  I was expecting an insanely great experience, but my first impression was that network access was slow and flaky.

To test my impression, I compared it to a Dell Precision laptop.  First, I pinged UCLA, a nearby university, 100 times using both the laptop and the iPad.  The average ping time for iPad was 63.7 milliseconds, over twice that of the Dell, and the standard deviation four times as great.  No wonder it seemed flaky.

	Dell	iPad
Minimum	18	22.7
Maximum	120	231.9
Mean	30.2	63.7
Standard deviation	14.9	64.8

Next I tested file transfer times (Mb/s), and the laptop was faster:

	Dell	iPad
Upload	6.29	1.77
Download	1.83	.17

That was no surprise given the variability in ping times. It doesn't look like I'll be making a lot of Skype calls or watching movies in bed.

My bedroom is at the back of the house, so I checked the signal strength. As shown below, it dropped to around -65 db as I walked from the office, where the WiFi access point is located, to the bedroom.



The laptop is not perfect in the bedroom -- it does better when it is near the access point, but its radio is clearly more sensitive than that of the iPad. iPad Wifi is more like that of a netbook than a laptop.

Notes:
I measured iPad ping time using Typhuun System Scope Lite, the transfer rate using Speedtest.net and the signal strength with Metageek Inssider.

A reader pointed out that the results were affected by my pinging UCLA, which introduced Internet and server variability into the test. I repeated the test, pinging a machine within my house and found the following:

Dell: minimum 1, maximum 90, mean 5.96, standard deviation 12.6 with zero dropped packets (1 sec timeout)
iPad: minimum 5.04, maximum 202.02, mean 18.56, standard deviation 32.49 with 8 dropped packets (1 sec timeout)

Not surprisingly, the iPad remains relatively poor.

Intel RCP -- a packaged rural wireless solution

We discuss wireless communication, and an earlier class used WiFi wireless technology to connect our campus dorms to the Internet. They used 802.11A for the links between the dorm buildings and 802.11G to connect to student's computers in their dorm rooms inside the building.

Intel has taken a similar approach with their Rural Connectivity Program (RCP). (Watch the short video). They have combined the components we used in the dorm into a single, commercial package. An Intel RCP node puts two radios (one using 802.11A for a long distance link and a second using 802.11G for user connectivity) in a weatherproof box along with antennae for local access and a high-gain, focused antenna for the longstance link. They also modify the modulation method to improve communication speed and reliability.

Our dorm buildings are only 100 or so meters apart, whereas Intel intends RCP links to be as much as 60 miles apart. Their goal is to provide a link from a rural village or farm back to an ISP for Internet connectivity. Their target market is developing nations, but many rural areas in the US also lack connectivity.

Can you think of a place where Internet access is not available in the US? Would Intel RCP offer a solution?