IM Roadmap

An old friend posted a month or so ago a valid lament – where are all the great new web innovations?  Facebook, Twitter and others are solidly in monetization mode now, and as Nick points out this is probably a pretty good indicator of maturity.  In other words:  kinda boring.

I don’t know what the next new new web thing is going to be, but I can hazard a couple of guesses for things that are coming, given trends social and technological.

1. Highly immersive and natural interfaces. I think we are the on threshold of some very interesting hardware mashups.  Take 3D displays, gesture-based devices, natural user interfaces, and pervasively embedded sensors.  Imagine a Microsoft Kinect-type device, with 3D CAVE-like projections on your walls, seamlessly integrated with high-fidelity video conferencing software.  Example:  Across from you would be your colleagues in a distant office, and to your right a projection of your Shanghai factory floor, and floating in front of all of you a giant, 3D, exploded CAD diagram of a faulty machine in that factory.
2. The Enterprise IT Village. In part, this is the pervasive diffusion of tools and solution development amongst employees of an enterprise.  We’ll all be building apps without even realizing it – dropping gadgets onto Jive pages and embedding training videos inside corporate employee wikis.  But also a fundamental change in the relationship of IT employees to corporate management, to each other, and to the profit center.  We need to move away from thinking that “official” enterprise IT has a monopoly on application development.  Those of us in IT should be helping our fellow IT’ers the way Google, Amazon, Facebook and others vend APIs to their users.
3. Sensors on … everything. I need to dig out the article, but I think it was Communications of the ACM had some statistics a few months ago.  There are going to be billions upon billions of sensor- and telemetry-linked devices and artifacts out in the world.  RFID, Bluetooth, mobile phones, etc etc.   Throw stuff like the Microsoft Tag in there too.   How will the physical and digital blur and interact?  Microsoft Surface only barely scratches the, er, surface.
4. Pervasive, low-cost 3D printing. Think of what this will do for collaborative prototyping, and trinket delivery.  Any other parents out there with Silly Bandz all over the house?.  ‘nuf said.
5. Augmented Reality.  If you haven’t seen it before, check out how McDonalds created an augmented reality game based on the film Avatar.   I played with it – it was a little rough, but decidedly promising.   Standardized tools and protocols could enable a rash of development.  Use it for training, product assembly instructions, remote troubleshooting, ….

OK – I guess I broke somewhat with Nick’s original thesis.  These aren’t purely new web things.  But, there are two themes from these.

• First, our digital lives will interact more fluidly (and invasively) with our physical lives, and vice versa.  Start imagining how some of the above technologies could be integrated….
• Second, the next step change in enterprise innovation will come when we are developing, sharing and trading tools, widgets and data for our peers in an ad-hoc, collaborative fashion for the good of the employee community.

Cheers,
Eric

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Video Conferencing, twitter, facebook

I want you to check out this video (and below), but before you hop away and view the video follow me on some extrapolation.  The video shows the XOS2 robotic enhancement suit being developed by Raytheon for the military.  It straps on to a soldier, and has high-power robot joints and motors that the user “wears” to give them superhuman power and strength.  Amazingly, they think they could have this out in the field as quickly as five years.  Basically, this is targeted currently as a way to help infantry carry heavy loads, and in logistics roles.  Remember Ripley in Aliens 2 using the big loader to fight off that evil alien queen?  Like that, only without the alien.

So, really, what is the role of the human in this case?  Basically, the human provides a framework onto which the suit attaches, of course, and the human provides the intelligence to control it.  You swing your arm, it detects that and amplifies the power.  So, it’s no stretch to imagine totally changing the application of this technology.  First, alter the construction so it’s self-standing – no human needed.  The tricky part here is balance, and that’s being solved on other robot projects.  So – then the robot is not just powerful, but also physically independent.

Next, deal with the control.  No – don’t make it fully autonomous like in Terminator. :-)  Give it high-quality video and other sensors, long-range wireless communications, and load it up with high-end telepresence software.  Basically, high-fidelity remote control.  Someone in a room is looking at monitors of what the XOS is seeing, and can control it remotely.  Possibly with a scaled-down XOS suit themselves, just wired up with the sensors but not the motors (this is not too dissimilar to how they do motion capture in movie making now).

If you want to take it a step further – add a high-quality fully immersive virtual reality system like the CAVE* developed originally at UIC, and you’ve got a pretty amazing way to (almost) fully experience a remote environment and interact with it.    Imagine yourself in your office or family room, with some remote place projected on the walls around you, and you controlling a robot thousands of miles away.

There are both terrifying and thrilling prospects from this.   Let’s cover the terrifying one first, and get that over with.

1. You think drones flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan are impressive/scary/amazing/inhumane/whatever-your-view – we could now create drone/remote control “soldiers”.  No doubt the military already is way ahead of us here – so don’t be surprised when it happens.  Did you know that the drone pilots are often working at military bases here in the US?  Imagine the ability to wage war thousands of miles away without the political cost of risking your own soldier’s lives?  Will that make war more or less palatable to governments?
2. On a more positive note, and in keeping with our blog’s topic, you could use it for ….. yes, you’ve got it, remote collaboration.   Let’s say you have a series of plant inspections you have to make of some potential new suppliers in Europe.  They’re in London, Frankfort, Barcelona and somewhere in Macedonia you still haven’t found on the map yet.  You could book a couple of weeks, fly over there, get train or airfare between the cities, get hotels, … spend a ton of money, be jet-lagged and out a pile of money.  Or, rent remote controlled light-duty XOS-style robots in each of your locations, plugged in to them in the VR and telepresence-enabled comfort of your home or office.  You could physically inspect and interact with people and objects in four geographically dispersed sites, all in an afternoon, switching between them with no more difficulty than making a phone call!

Think I’m crazy?  Think again.  Pretty much everything we do and use every day, everybody thought was crazy at some point in the past.   It’ll happen.

Cheers,
Eric

PS, thx to friend Bala for the original article.

* As an intern many moons ago I had a tiny, but fun, part in the release of the original CAVE at the 1992 SIGGRAPH convention.  It’s still amazing, even by today’s standards.  I’ll do a follow-up post on it.  See if you can find it on Google though …

Today was the anniversary of the fateful Apollo 13 flight.  NBC’s show DateLine had a great special on the real story today.   If you can find the full episode, I highly recommend it.

At one point in the interview, Matt Lauer asks Gene Kranz if he was at all concerned that the astronauts simply could not perform the tasks that were required of them.  Cold, dehydrated, tired, hungry, 200,000 miles from Earth and performing beyond any imagineable limits of human endeavor, weren’t Gene and others at Mission Control worried that simple human error would cause another disastrous mistake up in space?  He replied simply that no, the relationships were such that you didn’t even consider that.  There was that much of a level of trust.

Trust is the important element.  I started work on a paper back in 2003 proposing a business model for collaboration.  That is, how do you figure out the right technology is right for a given business context?  What’s best for colleagues of equal status and similar expertise but separated by timezones?  What is most helpful between counterparties on a complex transaction, where they have not worked together before, but where they similarly cannot meet face to face?  We think we know the answers to these implicitly, but do we?  Research I’d done before then showed that that was not always the case.  In one particular situation we’d set up high-fidelity video conferencing links between our clients and their account managers internally, and after the initial novelty usage trailed almost completely off.  Why?

My proposal, back in 2003 and still today, is that collaboration consists of three distinct elements:

• The sharing of knowledge
• The division of duties
• Trust

… and that this is true for all human collaboration.  The exchange of information and knowledge is what is the genesis and foundation of collaboration in the first place.  Without some work out put, and hence a division of duties, it’s not collaboration – it’s just talking.  And lastly – you must trust the other party and they must trust you.  Trust in the accuracy, completeness and relevance of the information.  Trust that you are each going to do the work agreed.

Every business relationship can be defined on each of these three axes.  Further, these variables will change with time and circumstance.  So, how does this relate to technology?  A couple of examples:

• Some relationships, or situations, require detailed exchange of quantitative and high-precision data.  For these, verbally sharing that data over a video or telephone conferencing link would be both inefficient and vulnerable to error.   Email, team-based engineering tools, or even (yes) chat would be more appropriate.
• On the other hand, what about a new account management relationship?  In this case, the technology should help to establish and grow trust between the parties.  Where in-person meetings aren’t possible, go with secure, high-quality video conferencing.

Again, how do we use this business model to effect technology decisions?  Take the second example above.  Video conferencing is often more expensive than, for example, chat.  Especially if pervasive, of high definition and employing robust security.  As time goes by in the relationship, the parties know each other better and have established levels of rapport and trust.  Perhaps more collaboration-supporting communications would then move from video conferencing to phone, email or chat.  All of which are likely less expensive than video conferencing solutions/services.

The technologies available since Apollo 13 have of course evolved dramatically.  However, the events of that mission so well highlight the importance of trust in collaboration relationships that I couldn’t miss the chance to write about it.

I will be taking the PMP exam soon, so energies are focused there at the moment.  However, I’ve promised myself I’ll finally write up and publish the business model stuff.  So, more to come.

Cheers,

Eric

PS, couple great books:  Lost Moon, and Failure is Not An Option

Admittedly, I’m still partial to persistent, text-based, group chat.  Text is still the most content-rich.  And since I haven’t ranted on it in a while …

• My usual gripes are that you can’t conference with as many people as you can on telephone, or especially on group chat.  So, for group collaboration it’s inferior. Group text chat, in particular, has the advantage of not allowing for “blocking effects” that you can get on video, phone or even in person.
• It doesn’t capture, in a machine searchable way, the contents of a meeting.  So, you have to have a scribe/minute-taker.  So, it’s inferior and more expensive than group chat, news groups and email.
• And ok, yeah, so you can see the other person, and gauge their body language and other non-verbal cues.  If the video is of sufficient resolution and frame-rate.  And yes, research shows that during in-person conversations most communications are non-verbal anyway.  I’ve seen the research and I’ll buy it.   BUT…. what’s the fidelity of that non-verbal comms?  It would be interesting to see a study done on how much non-verbal communications actually gets transmitted faithfully over a video conference link.  There’s got to be some threshold (frame rate, resolution) at which non-verbal cue quality drops off.

For example ….  If video quality is 18 frames per second, resolution is VGA or worse,  and the other person’s face is poorly lit and taking up only 1/4-1/3 of the frame – are you even capturing all the sidelong glances and other expressions that we think we’re getting?

Cheers,
Eric