Connected Car

Only a small percentage of vehicles are now connected to Web services, but not so in the future. All cars and trucks eventually will be connected to both home and service systems, and they will be creating their own data streams, thanks largely to Intel Labs’ work. They will interact not only with drivers but with online services, infrastructures and other vehicles—the latter at close range, as necessary. They will have radar-like warning systems and will take evasive action when appropriate. All carmakers will participate in some fashion.

The Home Exploring Robot Butler (HERB) from Intel Labs uses its sensors to enable robots to perform useful tasks in dynamic and cluttered home environments.

The future user experience, according to Intel Labs, uses projected displays on everyday household surfaces like kitchen countertops to create interactive “islands.” A user could have a movie playing while making dinner or search and display a recipe right there on the counter.

Dispute Finder is the first and only tool that can automatically identify disputed information that you encounter on the Internet and automatically present alternative points of view through displays of highlighted information “snippets.”

Researchers at Intel have invented a new wireless device to make the collection of energy data simple and inexpensive for consumers in their homes. The device instantaneously measures and wirelessly reports the power consumption of each electrical load in the home.

Using a speech synthesizer, content such as a Web page or news is summarized for efficiency and a speech synthesizer is used to read the content for on-the-go consumption, all without the need for a visual display.

The Personal Vacation Assistant showcases a partnership with Fodor’s, in which the activities of tourists in New York City are captured in a device, uploaded and a blog entry of their experiences was created and posted, complete with pictures, maps and Web links.

In a joint project with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Intel Labs shows that thought-based user interfaces are not as far-fetched as one might think.

This power harvesting project addresses the ever-frustrating challenge of keeping mobile devices charged while trying to manage and reduce power consumption. In the future, these devices could communicate with each other to understand power states, harvest and transfer power between devices, and share workloads.

Intel Labs demonstrates two projects that help consumers and IT managers keep track of their multiple computing devices, such as their personal laptops and smartphones, in addition to their separate devices for work to adhere to corporate policies. Intel has found new ways to mitigate this “device overload” by blending these two worlds.