News from the ITU Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong

This article is part of my job. Sometimes you just forget about life meaning and start playing the game of your life.

The ITU Telecom World 2006 event sent a clear message: Asia, or China, wants to dominate the telecommunications future. Since 1971 the ITU Telecom World 2006 has been hosted in Genéve, but last year they moved it to Hong Kong. At the event there were 600 exhibitors, 30% less of the 900 who attended the last edition in 2003, but with 57% more participation of companies from China and Taiwan.

Huawei and ZTE booths

The Exhibition was hosted in the new AsiaWorld-Expo, an innovative building close to Hong Kong airport. You got a first impression of the chinese tast for innovation getting on the Airport Express, connecting Central to the Expo: the confortable seats have LCD touch-screens with several TV channels available.

The Hong Kong's Airport Express interior

The most interesting section of the exhibition in terms of new products or ideas was the Asian one, especially Japanise and South Korean. The western companies - except a few ones, like Motorola - were more concentrated on showing commercial products than demonstrating prototypes, probably under pressure to survive. A similar attention to the business were around the chinese booths, Hauwei, ZTE, China Telecom, China Mobile, where the feeling was that of conquerors more than survivals. Wandering at night around the Honk Kong streets, sorrounded by fancy skyscrapers, which were decorated with Christmas lights that NYC's Time Square could just dream of, gave you the feeling of a population competing to succeed.

Hong Kong's skyline from The Peak

Let's now see some of the interesting devices that I found in the Exhibition.
Transmitting emotions is what a pen invented by NEC could do: the device, named Kotohana, was flower-like shaped, and changes its colour according to the voice intonation.

Most people agree that the user-machine interface is one of the most important things to build easy to use devices: NEC was showing for the first time a Latticekey, an innovative keyboard for mobile phones. The Latticekey had 21 sensors that interacts with icons on the screen of the phone: you just have to move seamlessly your finger on the sensors to activate all the phone's features.

The Latticekey Interface by NEC

If you dont speak Japanise it's not a problem anymore: NEC was providing you with a prototype of a software interpreter installed on a mobile phone. You just needed to pronounce a sentence in English, check the text on the screen, and the application was taking care of translating in spoken Japanize to the counterpart, all this done in 2 seconds.

It's a few year that we read about the new e-paper screens: those are screens that instead of using a backlight to illuminate its pixels, reflect light like ordinary paper and are capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity or using processor power, while allowing the paper to be changed. Hitachi was showing a few B/W and colour screens, 13" wide: I swear they give a completely different experience than a LCD or a CRT.

Hitachi e-paper screens

Broadband is how we today connect to the Internet, usually using the telephone copper wires and an ADSL modem. The future of Broadband is optical fibers reaching our houses. This will enable to see TV channels with High Definition resolution (1980 x 1080 pixel instead of the traditional 720 x 480 of PAL system) and experience a revolutionary way to interact with TV. The Japanize operator NTT was showing many solutions for optical fiber systems and High Definition TV. One issue is that while copper wires can be tightly belt without loosing data, fiber optics cannot: NEC was proposing a new fiber which can be belt and thus easily installed inside an apartment to deliver.

The South Korean area had a nice multimedia projected carpet at the entrance: a sort of interactive seaworld with fishes running away from the visitors steps.

Interactive seaworld carpet at the South Koearan booth

I said interfaces are a key part of successful devices. A motion sensor bracelet was demonstrated at the S. Korean industry booth, capable to control the wireless connected devices in the vicinity. And in the future probably we will connect the headset to our phone using a system transmitting over our skin, thanks to skin conduction: we will really say that some sentences will make us shiver!

Wearable bracelet controller

Anyway wearable computers are just around the corner: Motorola was showing a nice pink jacket with a keyboard and a couple of speakers integrated in it: you could connect your mobile phone to the jacket. This garment is what I dream of when I drop it in my some pocket of my winter coat and I cant find it anymore...

Wearable PC garment by Motorola

To read more:

www.itu.int/WORLD2006/
www.nec-design.co.jp/showcase