CEBIT 2005

I popped in the CeBIT in Darling Harbour (24th-26th May 2005) for a quick look around... four hours later I completed the circuit, and there will still things I didn't get to see. This is the biggest CEBIT yet, and you really feel it.

Every year in exhibitions you tend to get a different emerging technology that has prominence. This year's offerings manifested the emergence of broadband Internet, with technologies like Voice over IP and video conferencing having a big presence on the exhibition floor.

I had a play with the demo of a desktop interface developed at the Smart Internet CRC (at Sydney Uni) which used pens to drag around images, resize them, duplicate, flip, 'write' on the back, attach audio and throw into a 'black hole'.

The NICTA stand showed some of the work going on there (not particularly compelling yet -- and still far too narrowly driven by traditional ICT research paradigms). They did give me a demo of a scheduling application that I thought we could use at Sydney Uni! The new version (ERS-7M2) of Sony's AIBO is a bit sleeker than the old model -- more a working dog, and less a lapdog. It seemed pretty responsive and lively in the demo.

Another cool demo was a commercial product called KEEpad that allows a lecturer to invite those attending to respond to questions using an infrared remote control. The questions are presented on regular PowerPoint slides, with an extra plug-in. The system registers each remote's entry, and immediately tallies the votes and displays the results, as well as saving these results to an Excel file. The most recent version doesn't run on a Mac; and I'm not sure how well it would be suited to Humanities teaching, but it represents a different mode of interaction that gives the audience some limited capacity to give immediate feedback in a lecture setting. It could even be a good platform to allows students to create experiments for interaction.

Interactive television presentation

This week's Technocultures class featured a talk from Justin Hewelt, who manages the Broadband Bananas website, and works as a consultant. Interactive TV seems to be reaching a threshold point.

The most compelling applications he showed used IPTV set-top boxes, the standard that seems closest to delivering video-on-demand. It runs over IP and ADSL to the home, but is not the Internet as much as a custom TV service. It is somewhere between broadcast/satellite/cable interactive TV (that sometimes have back-channels over phone lines, for example) and Windows Media Centre.

He also pointed to an excellent resource called Enhanced TV cookbook, which features detailed documentation of different standards for enhanced TV.

The lesson from his talk for consumer advocates is that (surprise! surprise!) interactive TV developers are looking to strategies to maximise their returns. It's worth contesting these standards as they emerge, and before they become entrenched.