Nokia Opens New Research Center in Berkeley
The research outpost will focus on technologies that can be brought to market rapidly.
On Monday Nokia launched a new research center based on the
campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The company already operates
research centers in ten other
locations around the world.
During a press briefing, chief development officer Mary
McDowell said that, given the current economic climate, the new center will not
pursue big-sky research but will focus on technologies that can be brought to
market in three-to-five years. Areas of particular focus will include user
interfaces, cognitive radio (a
way to enable wireless devices to more efficiently share airwaves),
technologies targeted at emerging markets, and what the company calls “context
modeling” (applications that rely on information from sensors and GPS).
At Monday’s launch event, the company offered demos of some research
projects already under development at its Palo Alto, CA outpost, including a
phone playing a 3D movie. As Duncan
Graham-Rowe reports today on
our site, 3D displays are going mobile. In the Nokia prototype, the effect is
created by projecting a different image to each eye and it requires specially-created
content. Phones that contain two cameras could allow users to create their own
3D content, said Henry
Tirri, worldwide head of Nokia Research Center.
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Watching movies seems to be the only marketable application
for non-holographic 3D displays so far. Last week at the Frontiers in Optics
conference in San Jose, I attended a session where researchers lamented the
inability of such displays to crack into the market. At that session, Gregg Favalora,
the founder of now-folded Actuality Systems, said that his company should have
focused on more gee-whiz, easier-to-market applications like displays for
corporate lobbies. (Instead, they did the engineering first, coming up with
some pretty amazing but expensive devices for projecting volumetric images of
medical scans used to plan cancer radiation treatments.) Watching a 3D movie on
your cell phone, or snapping 3D images on the fly, might offer just this
gee-whiz factor.
Nokia researchers also showed a project based in Bangalore.
The company supplies 65% of the mobile services in India, and most of these
phones are limited to calls and text messages–they don’t offer GPS or Internet
access. Deepti Chafekar, a researcher based at the Palo Alto Research Center,
said the company is testing a set of location-aware services that are based on
text messaging. For example, a user can send a text asking how to get
somewhere, and receive directions in the form of a text message. User location
is determined by proximity to cell towers. Another service being tested in
Bangalore lets users display their location to someone they’re texting with.