HELSINKI, Finland – Launched in June 2008, The Leadership Edge is an interesting little Nokia site dedicated to “insights into innovation from the office at the CTO at Nokia”. It’s been a little light on content until now (I’ve eagerly been checking), but earlier this week Christopher Iwata, Nokia’s Head of Research Strategy, posted a tantalizing piece looking seven years into the future, identifying key areas for research and the stuff that excites the Nokia Research Center most, including something called ‘Mixed reality’…
Iwata describes this term of ‘Mixed reality’ simply as:
“Enriching and sharing experiences in fused physical digital worlds. We’re excited about the communication and entertainment possibilities that emerge for spending our leisure and work time as our environment becomes digitally-enriched.”
This ties in with the concept of an Internet of things, something we’ve been intrigued by for many months on Conversations. Iwata highlights a very important point, that “solving the challenges in the technical environment will be critical to hide the complexity in our vision of the future.” And he goes on to re-iterate the vision for an Internet of things:
“Connecting everything and every place. The real potential of mobility converging with the internet will be set free when we can interact with our environment and discover information about things wherever we want.”
Another technical challenge in the same vein is a term he dubs ‘Dynamic wireless’:
“Liberating spectrum to expand markets. We figured that all the services people will want will require technological advances to expand the overall wireless market.”
Equally interesting highlights in his post touch on the concept of devices that can adapt to any suitable scenario, automatically sensing which physical form best suits the situation, mentioning the Morph project as a great example.
Interface is another crucial point he raises, highlighting the importance of developing and designing devices that are a joy to use:
“The future of mobile is about endless possibilities – but this could turn into our worst nightmare without corresponding advances to make the experience truly pleasurable.”
Photo from algenta101