PORTLAND, Ore -- Next-generation augmented reality displayswill employ smart-recognition of their users that melds context-sensitivevoice-and-gesture commands with total-surrounding awareness of other people,places, and things, according to John Kispert, CEO of Spansion Inc, who gavethe keynote address at the Globalpress Electronics Summit 2012 last week. Butsmart memory will be needed to wean these advanced user-interfaces off cloudconnectivity dependence, Kispert said.
"The bottleneck to next-generation user interfaces islocal memory," said Kispert. "The most advanced user-interfaces usercloud-assets to first recognize their user with facial recognition, then adjustthe context by switching preferences and augmented-reality displays that areaware of a user's surroundings."
However, in the future, according to Kispert, local memoryassets will substitute for cloud-based connectivity so that context-awareaugmented-reality displays react faster and do not have to be online tofunction properly. The Hansen Report on Automotive Electronics (January 2012),for instance, cited sluggish response of cloud-based user-interfaces as thenumber one complaint of automobile users. Likewise, advanced voice-baseduser-interfaces such as Apple's Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface(Siri) requires wireless cloud-access to work and still only provide responsetimes measured in seconds. Local memory assets, on the other hand, can providecontext-aware augmented-reality displays that not only recognize their user inmilliseconds, but also provide instant recognition of the other people, placesand things in the immediate surroundings.
"User-interface convergence today has eliminated theneed for manuals and instructions--people just know how things work," saidKispert. "But head-up displays, recognition algorithms and contextswitching needs to be able to rely on local memory to work well regardless ofwhether wireless cloud assess are available or not."
Not surprisingly, Spansion specializes in the NOR flashmemories that provide nonvolatile configuration assets to modern userinterfaces, which Kispert claims will be critical to weaning context-awareaugmented-reality interfaces off exclusive dependence on cloud-based assets. Bystoring the information that allows devices to recognize their user, switchcontexts, and recognize the other people, places and things in a user'ssurroundings, next-generation high-density NOR flash will solve the memorybottleneck that makes cloud-based augmented-reality user interfaces sluggish,according to Kilpert, resulting in safer, more secure displays that superimposerelevant tactical information in realtime.
This story was originally posted by EETimes.
