Video games made real

If you watched the Apple WWDC Keynote last week you'll have seen a live demo by robotics company Anki. Their "aim is to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into people’s everyday lives." Their demo, which didn't go entirely without a hitch (anyone who's ever given a live demo knows that feeling), was a new take on the classic game of slot cars. Only this wasn't a video game played on an iPhone or iPad, but a real racing game on a track on the floor with real little cars.
    The track was simply unrolled on the floor and the cars placed on it. They communicated by Bluetooth to an iPhone, however the cars are not driven by the iPhone but are rather given strategic commands. Watch the video below which explains it all - I can see Anki Drive being a popular Christmas gift. It also clearly demonstrates the great advances in recent years in sensor technology, algorithms and processing speeds.

Ian Watson

Alan #Turing chirps

At the Turing Festival a few days ago I came across a guy from a company that had an iOS app inspired by Turing's secure speech communication machine, ">Delilah. Towards the end of WWII Turing worked on a device that could encrypt speech, transmit via telephone or radio and decrypt the speech. The device was not ready in time to be used during the war.
The guys at chirp.io have taken this idea and made an iOS app that can take a photo or note on your iPhone, convert it into sound and transmit it audibly to any iPhone nearby running chirp - no wifi, no Bluetooth, just sound

#Turing apps for your iPhone or iPad

Tomorrow on the centenary of Alan Turing's birth why not impress your friends with some apps for your iPhone or iPad that reflect Turing's genius. The first is an Enigma Machine emulator called MyEnigma. You can select between different version of the machine: Enigma I, M3 and M4, Railway, G-312, or Swiss-K, and set them up just as you would a real Enigma: choose rotors, configure them, and use the plugboard to switch letters. If a friend has MyEnigma and both are set to the same settings then you can encrypt and decrypt messages just as with a real Enigma machine. You can also challenge yourself to see if you can crack the Enigma code as Alan Turing did in WWII (sorry there isn't an iOS app for his Bombe). As you can see from the screen shots MyEnigma looks quite realistic.

The second iOS app that is Turing related is the Turing Machine Simulator that allows you write programs for a Turing Machine, execute them and analyze the execution step by step.  The app comes with example Turing programs to play with.

Of course if you own an iPhone 4S then you can see if Siri can pass the Turing Test. Try asking it, "Siri, would you like to take the Turing Test?"
    Update: I came across this article about iOS Turing apps a couple of days after Turing's centenary.

Will you watch TV with an App?

I've posted about the rumours of the Apple iTV before (e.g. Will Apple own your living room), so I was interested when I came across an article in Business Insider called Apple's TV Dream Revealed, because it adds some interesting flesh to the rumours. Once again with Apple it's not the hardware that's important but the software (think iPhone 4S and Siri). Apple actually can't make a TV set that is technically much better than its competitors, but they will be able to make one that looks very cool, and with Siri and the iPhone acting as a remote, is easy to use. But that's not really the point.
    What this article posits is that Apple may be planning to alter the relationship we have with TV content providers. To date we have consumed TV shows via traditional TV channels funded by advertising and cable/satellite channels funded by subscription and advertising. Both schedule TV shows when they choose and until the advent of the PVR you had to watch your favourite shows when "they" scheduled them. Today many of us time-shift our programs with our PVRs and in my house we rarely watch a show when it's broadcast, mainly so as we can skip the adverts.
   Fast forward a couple of years when Apple has done deals directly with the producers of your favourite TV show: House, Downton Abbey, NCIS, Dr. Who... each is available as a separate App on iOS and therefore the Apple iTV. The Apps will not be free (though some TV Apps may be), but will either provide access to all shows in a series with a single App purchase (something like $4.95) or an in App purchase per episode ($0.99). The Apps will provide extra content, just like the current websites for hit series do; Grey's Anatomy is a typical example, with extra behind the scenes footage, bios of the actors, links to social media and information providing a wealth of added value.
   Now I'm not a TV executive, and I don't know what their funding models are, but I'd be surprised if the producers currently make as much as 66 cents per viewer per episode ($0.99 minus Apple's $0.33 App Store cut). Also this revenue stream will be global and across not just the iTV but all existing iOS devices (i.e., the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad). There are currently around 200 million iOS devices out there - that's quite a market for a hit series to tap into. 
   For you, the consumer, the advantages are that you can watch a series across all your iOS devices, the iTV in the living room, your iPhone on the bus, and your iPad in the hotel. You can watch an episode at your convenience as soon as it is released globally, without having to wait 6 months for it to air in your country and you have access to all the extra series related information. Finally, think about your current relationship with your cable/satellite provider. What are you really getting for your subscription? You're getting a few shows you really want to watch bundled with hundreds of shows you never watch. Is that a good deal for you or would you rather just pay for the shows you like.
   Apple may be about to do to the TV industry what it did to the music industry with iTunes.

The end of the desktop metaphor

Over the weekend I came across a couple of interesting articles that lead to an intriguing possible future. The first was that Apple sold more iOS devices (156 million) in 2011 than it sold Macs (122 million) in 28 years of their existence. Note that 2011 was the most successful year in the Macs entire history. So the basic point here is that very many more people are using iOS than are using OS X. Here's graph from Mashable that visualises this.

Apple Mac GUI

   So, the next article which resonates was in Gizmodo, which makes the point that the user experience of using iOS apps is very different to using programs on OS X. Basically, iOS doesn't use the desktop metaphor, which Xerox PARC first developed and Apple made popular with the Macintosh in 1984. You may not have thought about the desktop metaphor but it still reigns supreme on Macs, Windows and Linux. Think of a desk on which you have pieces of paper and reports you're working on along with some tools like a calculator, diary and calendar. As you move from one task to another the focus of attention switches from say a report to the calculator to the calendar. All are in sight but you only work in one at any given moment - this is the desktop metaphor. With iOS we give up managing where the files we are working on physically reside and allow the app to manage that itself, just as most of us gave up thinking about where our music is filed and allow iTunes to handle that.
   For the personal user I think this is an advantage, it will certainly help my mother. However, I am skeptical that it will work for the professional user handling, for example, dozens of similar documents but for different accounts or the programmer working on different projects. Being able to partition life into "Project B" and "Client X" is a tidy and natural process, which the desktop metaphor with its filing system accommodates well, hence its longevity.

Adobe Kills Mobile Flash

The tech news today is alive with Adobe's announcement that it's Flash plugin for mobile browsers will no longer be developed. Bugs for the existing plugin for browsers on Android and Blackberry will be fixed but there will be no new development. Instead the company will focus on HTML5 which allows browsers to do the same nifty animations and movies but is an open standard.
    Journalists immediately started to say the Steve Jobs has had the last laugh since he famously refused to allow Flash onto iOS devices. It's now hard to disagree. In April 2010 Jobs published an open letter to clarify his reasons called, "Thoughts on Flash", which said,  "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short...New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."
    It's hard to see now why developers would use Flash if they had the choice between HTML5 and Flash; unless they either don't have HTML5 skills (and are unwilling to learn) or are so bound to Flash for legacy reasons they have no real choice. I know this to be the case for several who are know faced with the decision of investing in HTML5 or seeing their products increasingly relegated to a shrinking PC ghetto.
    Adobe also announced it was cutting 750 jobs.

Apple's personal assistant - Futureshock

The rumours have been flying ever since Apple bought the AI company Siri that they were going to put an intelligent assistant in iOS devices that used voice recognition. Well the rumours were true, but more on that later. First a quick comment on the hardware.
   Apple invited selected journalists to their Infinite Loop campus today for a event titled "Let's Talk iPhone."After lots of stats of how many billions of songs and Apps have been downloaded, how Apple dominates its markets etc...the new iPhone 4S was unveiled. So many forecasters and "Apple insiders" have egg on their face today - where's the iPhone 5 they were all predicting? Personally I always thought that just as with the iPhone 3 the next release would be an "S" model. The form factor of the iPhone 4 is relatively new (and IMHO gorgeous), why would Apple want to make it obsolete so fast? The new 4S has a faster processor, a better camera, some tweaks to the antennae and that's about it. We'll see the iPhone 5 next year. Once again though the important announcement was the software.
   Tim Cook, the new CEO, at the start of the event said: "Today we're going to be learning about innovations in software and hardware, and the integration of all of these into a "powerful yet simple integrated experience." This perfectly captures Apples ethos - an iintegrated experience, which only they can deliver since only they design and manufacture both the hardware and the software. All their competitors do one or the other and have to team up to do both.
   So back to Apple's new Intelligent Assistant. This has been a dream of Apple's for a very long time. Way back in 1987 they released a concept video of what they called the Knowledge Navigator. This was an intelligent personal assistant that used voice recognition. You can watch one of the series of videos below.

   Siri was a company spun out of the CALO “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” project funded by the US DARPA programme. This was a huge AI research project that  ran for five years involving more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions in the US. It's  goal was “building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” Sounds useful.
   When Apple bought Siri, many people said Apple have bought a search company, but Steve Jobs always said that they'd bought an AI company. Jobs said in a 2010 interview "[Siri is] not a search company. They're an AI company. We have no plans to go into the search business. We don't care about it -- other people do it well." Jobs believes passionately that for too long we've adapted our behaviour to  interface with our computers. Touch is our native way of manipulating our environment hence the iPhone and iPad. But,  speech is our natural form of communication, and consequently we should be talking to our devices. Apple may have stolen another lead on the competition through their acquisition of Siri and into integration into iOS 5. 
   Siri launched there own iPhone app which ran on the 3GS, but, by there own admission, there was barely enough processing power and they had to implement several shortcuts (you can read an interview with Siri's co founder Norman Winarsky here). Apple have waited until the hardware (i.e., the iPhone 4 and their new cloud infrastructure) is fully capable of running the Assistant. I don't expect this to be available on the 3GS. Winarsky says that apps like Google Voice are "partial AI" but that Siri is "real AI." He believes that "We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift. It reminds me of another SRI Project: Doug Engelbart, Inventor of Mouse augmented human ability back in the ’60s. Just as Steve Jobs took that technology and ran with it, we believe that Apple will use Siri to start another revolution."