Future of computing: Dr. Sudhir Dixit

Dr. Sudhir Dixit, director, HP India, talked about the future of computing.

According to him, user experience is vital to technology adoption.

* Immersive experience that is engaging.

* Intuitive interaction (input and output).

Cloud has become the main enabler or game changer. Also, connectivity is very important, Software is the third aspect. User experience is vital to technology adoption. Enoigh work is going on to make the user get an immersive experience that is engaging. Experience = Devices + connectivity + cloud + software.

One of the many definitions of an immersive experience is the awareness of physical self diminished or lost by being engaged in an all engrossing environment with severely diminshed sense of time and intense focus. Total immersion in VR - complete presence in virtual environment; total engagement, maybe, leading to addiction.

There has been several advances in experience technologies, a great enabler, and advent of MMI, 3D. holography.

Key challenges:

* Distributed IE use cases drive next gen networks, eg, remote cotrol, UAV (drone)

* Sensing and fusion

* Display

* Mobility and wireless

* Various form factors

* Collaboration and use cases

* Context and environment

What are barriers to ICT adoption by consumers and SMBs/SMEs? How would future human-computer interface and web access look like?

Immersion/augmented reality

* Visual - panoramic 3D displays

* Auditory - surround sound acoustics

* Touch/tactile - haptics and force feedback

* Smell replication

Multimodal interaction - its goal is to deliver new, compelling, user interaction experience to all!

What will the future displays look like? Displays are getting larger, wider aspect ratio and field of view, and more pixels per frame. Plastics could revolutionize display industry. These are lower cost, compatible with emerging display technologies, and also use OLEDs. For video capture, there are 2D array of imagers for panoramic mosaicking.

Large displays bring new challenges

-- revisit compression and networking

-- composing many independent sources of content

What about 3D? It is more realistic, engaging, improves communication, and makes complicated scenes easier to understand. The challenging goal: Continuous view 3D, no glasses, multiple simultaneous viewers. The challenging problem - there is a huge amount of data to deal with!

In summary, immersive interaction is very computing and memory intensive. Innervisve communication will be an important future application. The research challenges are immense, such as:

- Gesture authoring, MMI fusion, multi-user control

- Capturing and displaying high-qualty future content

- Compressing and delivering future visual data over future networks