Earlier this week, Nokia treated us to a couple of days in Oulu, northern Finland, visiting one of its key research centres. The event was focussed on “The way we live next” and gave us a glimpse of the kind of stuff that’s in development right now at Nokia.
And boy, was it a packed out event. Following a series of presentations (yawn) we were treated to one-to-one demos of the key technologies. We’re picking out the key ones for special treatment, but right now here’s the low-down on what we saw.
The Internet
Nokia’s top man on Internet type stuff, Ganesh Sivaraman, was on hand to tell us all what’s happening with widgets. It’s already looking quite cool, but the future is looking even cooler. Get the low down in our Intelligent Widget story. Nokia’s content sharing site, MOSH, has had a cool new feature added. Dubbed Seek, the new feature enables you to request content from other MOSH users. Super useful and already proving really popular.
Not just a camera
If you thought a camera was just for taking pictures, then you’d be wrong. At least according to the boffins who work at Nokia. They’ve been exploring all sorts of mad ways to utilise your phone’s camera, hooking it up to the Internet in the process. One of the cool apps revealed at the event was Point and find. Simply point your camera at an object ( a piece of clothing in a shop window, for example) and your phone will use the Internet to work out what the object is and throw up some info. Super clever stuff, though still in the early days of development (I.E. It’s still a theoretical, rather than practical application).
More camera shenanigans came in the form of shoot and translate. This bit of software uses your camera to scan a word or phrase using OCR (Optical Character Regognition) before sticking the text into a bit of translation software. It worked a treat on the mocked-up chinese restaurant menu on display, and we reckon would work just as well down our local take-away - we can never understand the menu there!
Robot noggin
Being the good citizens they are, Nokia sponsors a school in Finland. Not just any school, but one for the cleverest mathematic minds in the country. In exchange for getting their school fees paid, these young einsteins fettle with electronics and software with the hope of expanding minds and exposing genius. One of their, ahem, pet projects is the Robot pet. Using Open Source software, the guys managed to build and control a robot dog, using Nokia N800s for fido’s head and the remote control. All the instructions are sent over the Internet and having seen it in action, it all works a treat. What’s more, if you’re a bit clever, and know what you’re looking for, you can build one yourself. We won’t be trying that!
Even better though is the news that the boffins are working on a pimped up Roomba vacuum cleaner and along with a couple of N800s turning it into a remote control cleaner, using the N800’s camera as an all-seeing eye. The result? Vacuuming the house without leaving your sofa.
Check out more from the Robot Pet project here.
Touching me, touching you
Finally, the thing we all wanted to see at The Way We Live Next wasn’t actually there, at least not in real life. Reps from S60 were showing off the S60 touch demo though and giving us a sneaky peak at some of the interface elements they were working on. We’re talking about swish transitions, very AJAX type appearance and much slicker than anything we’ve seen on S60 so far. Not quite Core Animation yet, but we’re hopefully it’ll kick some fruity butt when it hits next year. Yes, next year. It was confirmed that Nokia does definitely have a touch device (the one shown off at GoPlay wasn’t a fake) and it’ll be ready for willing punters sometime towards the middle of next year. So there. Better tell Steve-O to get 3G sorted if he wants to have a proper fight!