One-Touch Control Inside Smart Cars

Open your phone, turn on your car’s computer, push one or two buttons on the Intel-based software, and everything is interconnected—to the phone and to services in the cloud. The synchronization software has long been an issue with on-board IT, but not anymore thanks to Intel’s client-to-cloud extensible architecture based on its Atom processors. Benefits of this will include total remote access and control, video surveillance, improved safety features (such as on-board radar to warn of approaching vehicles) and many others.

Here is an example of the Intel Atom-based on-board computer and how it will hook up to a vehicle. The new controls bring together many features that are now disparate in such systems, so that the entire vehicle can be controlled by one smartphone.

Intel is working on a new field of study called gait analysis, which is the systematic study of human and animal locomotion to measure body movements, body mechanics and the activity of the muscles. Gait analysis is used to assess, plan and treat individuals with conditions affecting their ability to walk. It is also commonly used in sports biomechanics to help athletes run more efficiently and to identify posture-related or movement-related problems in people with injuries. Intel deploys strategically placed sensors that measure and record body movement on various surfaces and stream the data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a cloud-based server for processing.

Remember the One Laptop Per Child initiative? The aim is to get a ruggedized yet inexpensive (under $150) PC into the hands of children living in Third World countries so they can further their own educations. Intel has its own version of this project called Automatic Classroom Collaboration in which small but powerful laptops using Intel processors are able to find themselves and connect together within a classroom—no searching needed. Thus, students are able to share documents and ideas immediately. More than 1 million of these are now in use in South America, Asia and Africa. Research on this project is evolving.

Extrapolation of super-computing trends from tera- and peta-scale to mind-boggling exa-scale (a million trillion ops per second) is challenging current IT. Thus, even a small efficiency improvement in processors can make a very big difference when multiplied to such scales. Runnemede is a project funded in part by DARPA to make the absolute most out of every processor in a node. Runnemede software uses tiny “codelets” inside cores, effectively making them “smart” cores, to use only the number necessary to handle a workload, thus saving much power and heat. In this illustration, the same workload is being processed by two nodes, the left one is a standard chipset using all cores, while the right one is using only the cores it needs (green means “on,” red “off”).

Intel Labs Researcher David Boundy shows Intel Labs Europe’s Renewable Data Communications demo, a trial solar-powered delay and disruption-tolerant network developed and deployed to remote communities in northern Sweden. This enables Internet-like services for the distribution of educational content, communications, environmental monitoring and more.

Intel is working on software that enables casual users to create and build their own computer-generated animation videos. It uses facial recognition, gesture detection, 3D capture for modeling and rendering, and real-time networking to do the job.

The photo here does not nearly demonstrate the extreme clarity of the Imperial Crown of Austria that was shown on a high-definition screen at the exhibit. This technology is used for virtual prototyping, architectural visualization, online car configurators and other tasks. You can see by the spec sheet how detailed this software gets.

Intel Labs’ Magic Mirror aims to transform the shopping experience using a realistic avatar of the consumer dressed in the latest fashions, showing Intels research in body tracking and parametric human body model. This demo uses a 3D avatar that tracks your movements in real time. You will be able change the dimensions of the body with a gestural interface.

Intel bought McAfee a year ago and is continuing to innovate in the security/authentication sector. The chipmaker is investing millions into academic security research and continually “baking in” new security features into its forthcoming processors, such as??íthe ones shown in this slide.

Even though Intel has been researching the idea of using light as a replacement for electricity for more than 10 years, it remains a project that spurs the imagination of many people. Intel’s 50G Silicon Photonics Link is the first to work end-to-end with integrated lasers. When this is perfected, we will all see vast improvements in the speed of data across networks. Pictured is the first “Frankenstein” version of the link.

This specially rigged bicycle earned some attention at the exhibit. You simply pedal as you would normally, and the power generated from the rear wheel turning is stored in a device that is able to run a PC (top).