Mobile and Immersive Experience
More and more people are interacting with technology at work, at home, or when mobile. Over 79% of American adults use the Internet, and 59% connect to the Internet wirelessly using Wi-Fi or mobile broadband through their laptops or cell phones. And Americans spend 36% of their online time communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email, and instant messaging.
People are looking for fast, context-aware methods of interfacing with technology. They expect that technology to be easy to use, reliable, and personalized---transparently enabling mobile and immersive experiences. And nothing will drive the continued growth and applicability of technology more than the point of human interface.
At HP Labs, we see a future in which human interaction through and with technology becomes completely intuitive, wherever you are. To get there, we’re radically simplifying the user experience by focusing on seamless collaboration, across devices. We’re also harnessing the collective intelligence of connected populations inside and outside enterprises to create novel technologies and services. And by making computer and human interactions intuitive and cognitively simple—wherever you are—the adoption of information technology will be far more pervasive than it is today.
Mobile and Immersive Experiences seeks to create compelling user experiences that fundamentally change how people communicate, collaborate, socialize, and entertain---utilizing multimedia technologies to deliver intuitive, interactive, mobile, and immersive audio-visual experiences.
Mobile and Immersive Experience Big Bets
Continuous View Glass-Free 3D
The goal of our Continuous 3D research is to build systems that accurately replicate the physical world with respect to our visual and auditory senses. We aim to build technology that will faithfully capture, transmit, and reconstruct the appearance and sound of our 3D world. Multiple viewers, simultaneously looking at the same display, will see different views and see their views change in response to movement, with no need for special glasses. This requires significant innovation in both the capture and display of 3D visual and auditory information. It also requires significant advances in high-quality compression, transport, and processing of 3D video and audio.
Next Generation Displays
Our mission is to create the display that is the central component of the next generation of “thin” appliances or “Information Surfaces.” The future will bring a display that will be able to show print-quality information as well as video and interactive media, will be lightweight, robust and mobile, and can be manufactured at low cost and with low capital investment. Because of its paper-like and video capabilities, its flexible form factor and ease of customization and integration into products, this display will also enable novel product capabilities such as active surfaces and skins.
Intuitive and Rich User Experiences
As IT and computing devices become increasingly sophisticated, enhancements in human-device interaction are poised to be key drivers for technology adoption, particularly in emerging markets. In addition, other barriers to adoption that these tech-naïve users may face include lack of a compelling value proposition; unfamiliarity with the interaction metaphors of keyboard and mouse; lack of content in local languages; the predominant use of paper in their daily lives; and unique cultural requirements. HPL’s vision is that usage of a personal computing device will become as simple as using a mobile phone or TV, or even as simple as talking to another human being. Our goal is to develop compelling services, a distributed experience software platform, and a hardware/software architectural ecosystem that bridges the gap between mobile and fixed experiences while leveraging the value of the cloud.
Seamless Collaboration
Our research in Seamless Collaboration aims to extend telepresence from fixed infrastructure solutions to everyday devices. Our work will enable HP personal computing devices to create the sense of effortless connectedness that exists in a face-to-face meeting, and provide a rich range of human interaction and collaboration. We are making fundamental advances in research areas such as audio and video capture, video communication, video rendering, new mobile experiences, and augmented reality.
Social Computing
Our work aims to harness the collective intelligence of the connected population inside and outside enterprises to create novel technologies and services. Ours is an interdisciplinary approach, combining social and computer science. We focus on the economics of attention, creating models to understand and harness the flow of collective attention, supporting a mobile society with context-aware and anticipative technology. We want to enable a fluid enterprise, where collective intelligence is harnessed via appropriate incentives to predict the future, make decisions, and allocate resources.