Computer Animated Newscaster on the Pocket PC

Late this year Tigris will hit Hollywood, but you won't see her on the big screen. Tigris (see Screen 1), a computer animated newscaster, will appear on color screen Pocket PCs, and she will present to you news, weather, sports and business ­ all via your mobile phone. Alongside Tigris will be a range of new services over the existing mobile phone networks, including video conferencing, home surveillance, watching the stars at the Hard Rock Café in LA, looking at traffic build up on wireless traffic cameras and finally, downloading film trailers of new movie releases straight to your Pocket PC.

Screen 1:  Tigris is the TIE project's virtual personality appearing on Pocket PC screens presenting news, weather, sports and business information via wireless mobile phone technology.

To coincide with the launch of their LA office, Pedagog Limited (www.pedagog.com) is providing the technology for a 25-man trial based in Los Angeles, together with content from Entertech Media Group Inc (www.entertechmedia.com), the Hollywood film company chaired by John Daly, best known for his big screen accolades for 'Platoon,' 'Last Emperor' and 'Terminator'. The project code named TIE (Tigris In Entertainment) is a new step in wireless data applications, only possible due to the release of new technologies.

Progress is the basis of ... progress

In the last few years, rapid progress has been made in thin clients, wireless connectivity, Internet video and more efficient codecs (compression/decompression algorithms). In addition, powerful (150-233 MHz) 64 bit color Palm-size and Pocket PCs have become available, running Windows CE 3D rendering engines and remote command sets. The proliferation and globalization of mobile networks have made data more available and caused a big increase in mobile users. The TIE project uses all these advances, camouflaging the serious core technology with a sexy presenter in the face of Tigris.

So what are the core technologies that are at play here? One of the services I mentioned is video conferencing. It may come as a shock to some communications experts that bi-directional video at two frames per second over 9.6 kbps baud GSM is already available in Europe using H263+ bitstream codecs (which are 95% replicated in Mpeg4). Port this onto a color-screen Casio Pocket PC equipped with Casio's Digital Camera Card and you immediately have a working solution. There are parts of the U.S., including Los Angeles, where companies such as AT&T provide CDPD (cellular digital packet data) wireless technologies giving 19.2 kbps data. This brings video conferencing to around 10 frames per second. Video is usually defined at 25 frames per second with the visual cortex recognizing smooth motion at anything over 17 frames per second. While not quite there, 10 frames per second is within striking distance of the goal.

I also mentioned home surveillance. Wireless surveillance of your own home is covered through remote systems that plug into your normal phone socket and power supply, switching it on like an answering ma-chine as you go out. Then from anywhere in the world you can use a Palm-size or Pocket PC to watch what's happening in your home. Similar technology is already being used in London by parents watching their children at drop-off Daycare Nurseries (www.parentwatch.co.uk). A variation of this is used in solar powered wireless CCTV cameras which are already available (www.shawley.com) and behave to some extent like web cameras except over the mobile phone network.

Ironically, the most unspectacular use of this technology is in downloading film trailers and playing them on the GlobalMovie player (see Screen 2). GSM's download rate of 9.6 kbps means you may have to wait up to five minutes before you can view the trailers.