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Unveiled last summer, Intel’s Experience and Interactions Research promises a new way to develop projects. What they’re showing looks pretty familiar, though.
If Dr. Genevieve Bell, the only Intel Fellow who’s an anthropologist, has her way, Intel’s product development process needs to change. Last summer, Intel announced that Bell would be the head of a newly created lab under Intel’s research umbrella known as “Experience and Interactions Research.” The idea is to create products based on users' desires – and to try to predict what those desires would be and what form they would take in a few years.
Intel Labs display at IDF
The day before Intel Developer Forum officially started, researchers from the new lab gathered to show off the fruits of their efforts. A number of the projects look pretty familiar, however. To be fair, the new lab is only a few months old, so it’s no surprise to see older projects grandfathered into the new organization.
Even the older projects have evolved, however. Take Intel’s perennial ray-tracing demo, for example. Intel has been trotting out a ray-traced version of Quake Wars: Enemy Territory for several years now, using big iron servers to generate fairly anemic frame rates. This year, they were showing non-interactive (but real-time) rendering of the latest Wolfenstein title – arguably the same game engine. The new wrinkle is that Intel is using their new, high density multicore “Knight’s Ferry” hardware to represent real-time ray-tracing delivered through the cloud. We’re already seeing streaming game solutions like OnLive become a reality, so the idea of high quality ray-tracing delivered over the cloud isn’t a big stretch.
One interesting demo used context aware facial recognition to manage the increasing number of systems used when driving a car. Today’s automobiles offer Bluetooth connections to your smartphone, integrated GPS navigation systems, smart cruise control, and other systems that demand a driver’s attention. Facial recognition software could recognize the driver, and pre-set all the systems to preferences a particular driver might want. For example, the father might want to load a different set of programmed radio stations into the satellite radio than a daughter would want, and all that can happen automatically behind the scenes.
The most interesting aspect of the new Experiences and Interactions Research is how the new research going forward is being accomplished. Researchers and engineers are being deployed worldwide into user environments, including schools homes and businesses. The goal isn’t to have quick-and-dirty focus meetings, but to have the researchers live, watch and learn from the different user experiences in different cultures worldwide. Whether actual product definitions will emerge from this is still open to question, but it’s an interesting approach for a company known more from its engineering prowess than end-user awareness.
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