Home > Projects > PhoneAbility > Location-based services > Location-based services technology and its potential as an aid for navigation

PhoneAbility

Location-based Services Technology and its Potential as an Aid for Navigation

Professor Mike Jackson

PROFESSOR MIKE JACKSON: I will say just a little bit about my background in a minute, in so far as it's relevant to the presentation. This is a daunting audience, being made up of eminent academics, specialists in the field of disability, and also, I notice, industry represented, in terms of the telecommunications companies, et cetera. So a very wide range of backgrounds.

I thought that, as the first speaker of the day, and given my personal position as an academic running a research centre, that I would try to cover some of the longer-term research possibilities relating to location-based services and navigation.

The danger with that, of course, is that you will think that I am in cloud-cuckoo land in terms of the reality of delivery of some of those technologies within a reasonable amount of time, and so that is perhaps where it's worth just saying a few words about my own background.

Back in 2000, I was the chief executive of a company called Laser Scan, a small plc, which developed software applications and database technology for what's known as geographical information systems or location based services. Even at that time, we had identified the potential of providing geographic spatial information directly to individuals via mobile devices.

At the time the technology, in a hardware sense, was lagging well behind thatpossibility. But it was the time of the dotcom boom, and so, there was quite a lot of interest in us.

One day I arrived at the office to find that somebody had bought 29.9% of the company, put in a takeover bid and we had 30 days to defend or sell. The company who were buying us were mainly interested in our technology to apply to location-based services in in-car navigation. They won the bid, the shareholders were happy. To that extent, as a shareholder, I wasn't totally unhappy, although it is a bit like losing a baby, I guess, when one loses a company.

I moved on and went in a short time to join a company which is now known as Three. It's the mobile telephone company whose services I am sure you have seen the adverts for. Three is part of the Hutchison Wampoa empire with 3G telecommunications companies around the world. I was employed to design location-based services technology for their third generation networks.

It was an interesting position at the time when Three had only recently been set up. Money was no obstacle. In fact there was no budget. One just spent what one thought was necessary. I think it was the first time in my life that that had been the case, and we got through a fair bit of that money and developed some very smart software technologies.

What became quite clear, as time moved on, was that neither the investment by the people who had bought Laser-Scan for in-car navigation nor the investment in 3G location-based services was timely, in the sense that the technologies were not ready to provide the type of compelling services which were easy to conceive of, but much more difficult to deliver.

I next moved on to run the space division of an organisation called QinetiQ - a very different sort of industry. In space, we were looking at missions as far out as 2030 looking at probes for example, to Mercury and Venus. Planning 25 years ahead in that context was not only possible, but probably necessary, because of the natural lag in terms of delivering the necessary solutions.

However, eventually the lure of location-based services was too strong, and when the opportunity of setting up a research centre at the University of Nottingham arose, it was sufficiently strong to take me away from the commercial riches, shall we say, to academic hardship, but at least with the flexibility of doing things that one was passionate about.

This long introduction is to explain that my background is largely technology. I am not a specialist in disability, provision of services for disability or location-based services in disability. I think the expertise for that will come from the speakers who speak later today.

I will talk about some of the very long-term technologies, and in other cases, technologies which are perhaps coming rather faster than we expected. I think they will add up to a technology platform, a software platform, and increasingly a data platform, which will allow those with an understanding of the needs, with the marketing flair and the commercial acumen, to put together the applications which many of you will have read about, and in a way which is commercially more credible than it was five or six years ago.

In industry, one is always worried about today or tomorrow. Even in an organisation like QinetiQ, which is very much a research oriented organisation, it is increasingly difficult to be concerned about things which are, say, more than three years ahead. The role of academia, on the other hand, is to pick up from that timescale and look further into the future.

The immediate period of less than three years is the remit of the industry practitioners now. To have a product or service capability within a three-year timescale you already need the technology in place. You are at the stage where you are finalising your product capability. You are entering into your marketing programme and beginning to launch that into the market-place. Unless something is pretty strongly defined now, it is unlikely to be available in a mass market context within less than three years. As an academic, I leave that time-period to industry.

As one moves further into the future, from an academic's point of view, it becomes more interesting. One can sit and contemplate the future, ponder on things, without ever really being called to account! It is sufficiently far off that, by the time you reach it, people have forgotten what you said, and most likely have forgotten you in the process. And yet there is a need to have a longer-term vision to set the context and the shape of what we are doing in a research mode in the shorter timescales.

The difficulty is deciding what is insightful academic "think-tank" thinking, and what, even if, insightful, science fiction. Somewhere between the two, there is a dividing line.

The sort of analogy I sometimes give is that, if we were to go back to when I started my business career, there were large typing pools, with ranks of people sitting at typewriters and usually a fairly fearsome individual at the top controlling access to the people who were doing the work.

One could have spent a lot of time thinking through how to automate that process: how to make the typists more efficient, how to make the typewriters easier to use, less prone to causing strain and wrist injuries. However, after 10 or 15 years, the modern generation doesn't really even know what a typing pool is.

We have to be very careful not to tackle problems which are here and now, but which actually will be passed by because of other technology developments over the coming years. We have to have a wider perspective of where industry is going. Research work has to be based not on solving the immediate problems associated with today's way of doing things, but rather tackling the issues which will in many cases unlock completely new ways of doing things.

The timescales I am really interested in split between the two areas of three to seven years and seven to twelve years. In the first period, as a centre looking at location services and what we refer to as geospatial intelligence, most of the hardware technologies which are necessary for that research exist at least in prototype stage, so we can see what is not just theoretically possible, but what is practically implementable. It is not necessarily to say that they will be implemented or commercially viable, but we can see what the technology in hardware terms can deliver.

The seven years plus is the more reflective think-tank form of operation, where we are trying to define the context into which the future will move and the real priorities which we have to tackle in that shorter period of time.

I hope that this was not too convoluted an introduction to what I now want to present. The first few slides I am going to show are what many people will think of almost at the science fiction end, but I want to use them to make a point.

There are technologies now demonstrable that could completely change our way of thinking and doing things within our lifetime. They are often thought of as science fiction, but the reality is that steps have been made already.

Quantum computing is one of these technologies. This is the exploitation of that weird quantum state of the world where things can exist in multiple states simultaneously. With our human brain we find it difficult to conceive, but we can demonstrate it. Already, work has been undertaken demonstrating quantum effects, quantum communication and quantum computing capabilities.

It's not to say it will evolve in the next few years, but it might do. If it does, it changes the potential power of computing for certain types of operation, not just by 5 times, 10 times, 20 times, but by 1,000 times or millions of times. So, it changes the whole basis of some types of computation.

The next technology example is a very interesting one - certainly in the world of disability - and that is the ability to communicate directly from the brain to a machine. Again, it is often thought of as the stuff of science fiction, yet already experiments - quite invasive ones as far as the individual are concerned - have been undertaken which allow one to perhaps select on a binary basis between two options in a menu by thought-power alone.

In this week's New Scientist, there is an article on the use of functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) which discusses such a capability - in this case with a 90% success rate - of being able to determine whether somebody was thinking of a set of lines sloping in one direction as distinct from a set of lines sloping in the other direction. One starts to extrapolate how this might develop, it is easy to see how fundamental the changes to society could be.

A third technology which gets a lot of interesting press is nanotechnology, which is building machines at the molecular level. We hear the stories of little engines going through our blood vessels scraping off the cholesterol. They are great stories yet nanotechnology is already being applied to industrial and commercial applications. Many of us will be applying nano-particles to our face everytime we apply sun-tan lotion as protection against sun-burn.

Nanosensors are being developed. For example, by the Defence Advance Research Procurement Agency, DARPA, in the USA. The concept of the dandelion drifting across one's path containing a nanotechnology sensor e.g. a camera, or an atmospheric sensor may still be science fiction but for how much longer? Or consider the possibility of firemen as they enter a building scattering nano-sensors whilst wearing communications devices so that they can build up a picture of the building in their head-up display - where they are entering into the building and how they can retreat and escape if necessary.

But before we get too excited, we need to step back to location-based services vision we had in 2000 -although many of the possibilities we then envisaged are now achievable the commerical and economic realities and failure to address the consumers ability to intuitively interact with the technology means that the wide-spread adoption of technology is still some way off. There are also other technologies, such as artificial intelligence or natural voice recognition, which seemed highly probable 10 years ago, even 20 years ago to have society changing impact, but which have failed to evolve as fast as expected.

Having said that, can we ignore them completely, or should we instead just change the timescale over which they may shape our future world? Such technologies may seem to make little progress for many years and then sudden breakthroughs, perhaps in a related technology area can produce startling change.

There is an interesting example in the area of intelligent transport systems. The concept of being able to get into a vehicle, which is a robotic device, tell it where you want to go and it automatically drives you there, has been something in science fiction for a long while. Yet in reality it seemed to be one of those problems which actually was just too difficult.

DARPA, the Defence Advance Research Procurement Agency, had I think it was a million-dollar contest, where the idea was to have an autonomous vehicle cover a 250 km desert track and do the complete journey in under seven hours; quite a distance and speed in rough and difficult terrain.

Up until last year, no vehicle had managed more than a few kilometres. This is not a radio controlled vehicle; it is completely autonomous. Once it starts there is no human contact or direction at all. This year, five vehicles actually completed within the timescale, and I think one or possibly two just outside of the timescale.

This is what one reviewer thought about that situation: "The DARPA Grand Challenge October 2005 has moved critical development forward by one incredible leap." He has got excited about it. Of course, if you speak to a traffic engineer or somebody planning traffic in a real context in London, they will say, "That was the easy part. The real problems are still there."

However, the technology has moved one big step forward. These examples are all longer-term blue-sky type technical developments. But one doesn't need to look so far ahead to see some pretty exciting and challenging technology which could have dramatic impacts on how we live our daily lives.

I would now like to look at these shorter-term technology developments, and start to consider how they might provide a platform for people to create new applications.

The next slide identifies a number of these technologies. GPS or Galileo satellite positioning technologies, earth observation satellites, unmanned vehicles which can watch us day and night, VoIP, globally networked search capability, persistent surveillance developments.

In doing this, one of the most obvious to look at is mobile communications. The nest slide refers to third generation mobile communications, but actually 3G in this context is largely irrelevant as 2.5G technologies can give a similar bandwidth as currently available in third generation systems.

Because this technology potentially accesses nearly everybody globally, it can attract huge amounts of expenditure. The revenues can be, in fact are, huge. We saw that in the UK, back in 2000 when five UK telecoms companies - or four plus the new entry - spent £22 billion on their licences. £22,000 million was spent just for the right to operate these services. It didn't give the recipients of the licences any technology or any systems in place, or any products; it was just for the right to operate these services. We as the taxpayer benefited from that, because that £22b went into the exchequer. So, the buying power, the industry might, is very definitely there.

We see from the next set of numbers partly why. In 2005, on a global basis, 816 million mobile phones were sold: not owned, but new mobiles were sold. That was actually higher than forecast the year before, so this is not just about hype.

By 2006 over one billion new mobile phones are expected to be sold. The importance of that number is not just, "Hey, there's a lot of people out there with mobile phones", but it's to illustrate the churn rate, the rate at which new technology is entering the market in this context.

I bought my Nokia 12 months ago now. It was free for signing up to the Vodafone contract. It's got Bluetooth, a camera, a video camera, it takes GPRS, it will position me, et cetera. Having had it for 12 months, I can throw it away. Under my contract I am entitled to a brand new phone free of charge and a new contract, basically. The churn rate and the ability to introduce new technology is a key factor in this area.

What are we seeing as a result of this? We are seeing that this mobile device is not just something to talk to people as on a phone. It has messaging obviously, but it has data services. We can get the football results. With GPS we can even locate ourselves and navigate. We can send and receive e-mails.

Increasingly we will be able to watch TV on our mobiles. We can use them as a camera and as a video camera. With the link to our GPS, whenever we take a picture, it can record automatically where it is, so we can build up picture libraries which confirm routes and act as reminders of what scenery might have been like, or what somebody else has already done, to give a sort of virtual walk-through. That's where the new software starts to come in.

As they continue to develop, the links with the Internet over high bandwidth allow them to link in to the world-wide web, so you can now start linking to search engines. With your GPS enabled phone, the research can be location specific, so it can pull up the information about where you are. Whether you know where you are or not is irrelevant. It will know, and it can bring in just the geographically relevant content, so it potentially is a gateway to a huge amount of additional information. Of course, it can give both local and historical information. It can act as an electronic banking and financing system. Who knows where the technology will go?

Looking at the web pages just last week, there is a review of the new Sony Ericsson W950 phone. The reviewer was moaning about the fact that there is no storage card slot on this phone, so four gigabytes is all you get: four gigabytes! For those of you who go back just a little in computing terms, that blows the mind! For someone to be moaning about 4 Gigabytes seemed a bit hard.

The Nokia 6136 is interesting as well. That is to feature what is known as UMA support. What that means is that, every time you go into a WiFi wireless Internet hot-spot, it will automatically link to your phone and it will switch your voice communications to voice over IP instead of the expensive network calls. The service there is potentially two cents anywhere in the world. The other important thing is it provides a very high bandwidth capability to dump a large amount of information to your phone on this very low-cost WiFi high bandwidth basis.

So it starts to open up and make it realistic that your phone can have large amounts of local relevant content about where you are and what you are doing because you are no longer restricted to the expensive - high bandwidth but still relatively low in the modern sense - communications between these other devices. Automatically, each time you hit a hot-spot, you get a download of all of the local relevant information. That's a pretty exciting development.

The last one is the Samsung SCH-V770, which has a 7 megapixel camera phone, 3 x optical and 5 x digital zoom, autofocus, et cetera. For those of you into digital photography, you will know that 7 megapixels is a pretty good camera. It is capable of taking high-quality pictures, registering that to precise geographical co-ordinates, and the ability to build up databases of information and share that information with others. If you go into a new location, a new territory, a new country, one starts to see possible opportunities.

That's very exciting by itself, but the real excitement is that there are a number of such technologies now emerging in different fields. The trick and the excitement in setting up the centre we have at Nottingham is not in any one of these technologies in isolation, but in bringing a number of these technologies together.

So let's move on to the next technology, I have already touched on it so I won't say too much more. That is the ability to position yourself pretty much anywhere now, certainly in the built-up world, through the use of the US GPS global positioning techniques, satellites, and in the future through the European Galileo global navigation satellite systems, on which the EU are spending 3.4 billion euros and which should be operational around 2008/9.

But GPS or global positioning systems are only one means of positioning. To date, they have not been madly effective for mobile phone users, to be honest, because each time you go into a building - or even what's known as an urban canyon between high buildings - you tend to lose contact with the satellites and you need to have more or less visual direct access to the 4 GPS satellites to get a good fix.

But again the technology is changing. For example, the low signal strength GPS and massive computing on the receiver is allowing you to get much more precise positional information even in dense urban areas, and inside buildings even. QinetiQ have developed such a capability. Add to that inertial navigational sensors - digital compasses, accelerometers, things which can work out how fast you are travelling, in which direction or angle, and therefore compute from the base point your new location.

If you add the two together - your satellite positional technology and your inertial navigators - you start to have a device for navigation inside buildings, which is one of the steps necessary before mobile navigation systems really become credible. It is not acceptable, as a user, to suddenly walk into a crowded shopping area, or into one part of a building and out of another, and find you have lost your position. Then there is RFID. Radio frequency ID techniques and such like are starting to build up a family of positioning technologies.

Moving on again, these are all very well and good, we have the communications now and the positioning, but we need data. Again, there are major developments occurring in this sector. I have used examples of projects that were in my department at QinetiQ.

Devices for collecting the data needed for location based devices

TopSat is an ordinary satellite taking pictures of the earth's surface. The thing which was special was it was so cheap. It cost £12.5 million, which for satellites, is bargain basement stuff. The resolution was good, 2.5 metres. It opens up the possibility of having constellations of low-cost dedicated satellites collecting on a regular basis relatively large-scale data. But there is an inherent problem with non-geostationary satellites, of course, which is that they are not constantly sitting over one point of the earth, so one needs some complementary technologies for persistent surveillance.

The device on the left-hand side with the sunset is called Zephyr. It is a high-altitude long-endurance unmanned vehicle. It is solar powered at stratospheric level. It can undertake persistant surveillance, monitoring a spot on an ongoing basis for months at a time. And it's cheap - at only a fraction of the cost of say TOPSAT - which again is low-cost by the standards of the aerospace industry.

It has a lot of potential interest for defence organisations, which means that it is more probable money will be put into developing the technology, but it has also recently been bought, for example, by the Belgian environmental research organisation known as VITO as part of a European programme known as Pegasus, which is all about persistent environmental surveillance at a European level.

Then we come down to things which are much more everyday. All of these cameras on street corners. How do we start to incorporate network information that they bring us? There is a whole host of micro-sensors beginning to emerge. They provide location and monitoring information about the environment around us which can build up to provide a comprehensive, ubiquitous, persistent stream of data sources. There is a lot of excitement on this front.

So we have new and emerging mobile communications, positioning and data technologies. We still have to be able to deliver this technology to the user. We haven't been so good at that, bluntly. One of the big fiascos with early mobile phones in terms of the Internet was the WAP experience, where you pressed 50 buttons and on the 51st it lost the connection, and if you got to 52 it might have brought up a very hard to read little screen of minimal information.

So, delivery is a big issue. Let's not talk about the form of the deliverable product at the moment, but let's talk about the mechanisms. Here there is a lot happening. Most of us have heard of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and we have certainly heard of Microsoft. Each of these companies is engaging in the delivery of location information to the mass consumer. It's very, very early days yet to know how this is going to unfold, but already a lot of us get excited about what seems to be the case that they can deliver.

You could log in to Google and find out where you were coming today, at pretty high resolution. I can look at my house and I can see my car on my drive. This from un-classified satellite technology, which when I started my career was a gleam in the eye. Going back a few years, I spent a lot of time struggling to handle what then seemed huge 30mb files and getting decent-quality visual output NOw, far superior images are available free of charge on one's laptop or home PC. This is not Google Professional; this is just the run-of-the-mill Google which you can download free of charge.

This starts to give the ability to get a feel of the context of an area. You might study this, as I did, before I came to the meeting. What's the area like? I hadn't been down to the canal here before. I knew it was quite close to King's Cross, but just being able to look at this and get a feel of it. You overlay the map on to it so it gives the street names, et cetera. So, access and delivery of data in improving.

But it goes further than that. Big companies are coming together to start to unite different elements of these data delivery services for different purposes. Here we have an example where Google and Volkswagen have got together to start building three-dimensional virtual environments for navigation purposes. This is for navigation in the car at this stage. Pedestrian navigation is a bigger challenge.

The other fact is that often the image is only the starting point for lots of different data collections. If you look at the Google maps, you start to see all sorts of funny symbols on them. A lot of data has been added by individuals, as well as Google. In this case there is a funny symbol here, which is the location of a webcam. So, you now start to go from space to map, to identifying where cameras are located. You can start to zoom in to where the cameras are, to see the context of the camera.

This is by the Golden Gate in San Francisco - to see what traffic conditions are like. Then you can go into them in real time. This tells you what a sad individual I am! I think this instance was at 11.40pm my time and 4.40am New York time. I clicked on to a camera in Times Square. I was going to go out to a meeting there in a few days' time, and there had been heavy snow mentioned in the press. I just wanted to know what the road conditions were like. As it happens, the roads were all clear of snow.

But as I was watching - as you can see, if you have good eyesight, a shadow in the bottom corner. A second later, somebody came into view - not this individual because I didn't capture the individual frames fast enough - but someone who looked a bit shifty, who looked up, saw the camera and scuttled off in the other direction quickly. By the time I had the chance to capture the next frame the security guard came out in the other direction - great voyeuristic stuff!

But what real purpose can it serve? This is the intellectual and technical challenge we now start to face, because there are lots of multiple streams of data, from space down to cameras, down to sensing systems embedded all over the place, which can or could communicate with each other to build up a rich, timely, ongoing set of data.

How do we unite those different data sources, and how do we make sense of them? For those of you who can just look at them and have the time, that's fine, but not all of us can or have the time, so one needs to move into automated techniques of merging these data sources together and interpreting the information within them, and be able to serve information out.

I am coming to the end of the time I've got. One other quick example. A9.com is the Amazon web page which provides mapping services. What Amazon are doing is linking Yellow Pages or directory information (e.g. which says there is a pizza shop, a hardware shop and an M & S), to mapping information and to precise location information.

It is very simple technology. They have fitted up a vehicle with GPS and cameras, and they just drive relatively slowly down all of the streets, capture the photography, capture the position, relate it to the map, link it to their Yellow Pages and directory information, and suddenly you've got comprehensive databases of quite rich information. The slide shows an overview map at the top, there is a larger screen map on the left-hand side with a magnifying glass, basically showing you where you are, and then there is what you would see if you were in that location.

You get a big picture of any of these frames, but basically there are two strips here.

This is a sequence of frames, which are the photographs on the left-hand side and the right-hand side as you move down that street. You can go there and see what it looks like. You can say, "I wanted the Pizza Hut." You can see where it is; it's next to the junction, there is a parking bay just a block in this direction, and you can do a virtual walk through that territory.

Some friends of mine came round just before Christmas. They are retired, fortunately quite comfortably off. They were going off on a cruise along the West Coast of the USA. They had booked a hotel in Santa Monica and wanted to know what it looked like. We clicked on the zipcode of the hotel and got a view of the hotel in Google. We zoomed in. We could see little chairs on the broadwalk. Then we could do a virtual walk down the street to Ocean Boulevard. We clicked on to the cameras, because there were video cameras there, and we could see what it was like; the ambience of the area, how many people were there at that time of day, what the beach was like, the traffic. In a number of cases, you can control the cameras yourself. So, you can zoom in and pan the camera directly from your computer. Yet another strand of technology.

Microsoft have basically developed the same capability. They make it more fun. You can make yourself a racing car or you can be a sports car, or you can walk or drive around the streets from the map or image, or both, and you see what you would see out of your windscreen if you were driving down. You see what is on the left-hand side and the right-hand side. From the reconnaissance point of view, it's great.

I think probably the final slide, before I start to sum up, is just to show you some financials for these companies. Back in the LBS days of 2000, there were a lot of very innovative and exciting developments. Some very good work was done, but it was mainly by small start-up companies who didn't have the financial where-with-all to carry these things through.

Look at the numbers for the companies we are talking about. I have used the codes on the Stock Exchange: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and then for comparison IBM and Oracle, long-established IT companies. I use this sometimes when I am talking to colleagues at Ordnance Survey. OS have brilliant map data for this country, but I point out to them that their turnover per year is about £100 million.

If you look at Google - who people at least until recently think of as all hype and no substance - and check its profit, then it was $1.47 billion, a bit under £1 billion, but roughly ten times the turnover of our national mapping agency. This slide really is just to say there is the financial and corporate strength behind some of these technologies to turn them into the discussed ubiquitous consumer-based products, if a number of other things such as the marketing and the productisation can be got right.

That brings me to the end of what I was going to say, except for the final critical area of research, which I think is still largely missing. I attended the LBS for All just last week, and I know City is working on this, and one or two others, and ourselves at Nottingham. You may have the delivery mechanism, the positioning, the data and the database search technologies, but there's still a big problem of communicating or the bringing of all of these sources of data together into a coherent, interpretable form, and then delivering it in a manner which is pretty intuitive, because people are not going to go away on training courses to use these technologies.

As at the LBS for All day, basically they gave us a device to try and said, "There is no instruction book because if you can't use it just like that, then it's too complicated." So this is a real challenge, and the human factors element is a big issue. Our centre is a multidisciplinary one. We have the geographers, (GIS and remote sensing), we have the geodesists and computer scientists and engineers, and we also have specialists from the Institute of Occupational Ergonomics - the human factors people - to start to work with us and research into how people perceive their environment, the spatial cognition issues and how people navigate.

Are the old stories that men navigate differently from women true? Some suggest it is, others disagree. Do people who have been brought up in the countryside in a flat terrain navigate and view their world differently from someone brought up in a city? There are still many uncertainties and myths of this nature.

I am very much looking forward to the rest of the presentations and hearing the discussion. The final challenge, in conclusion, is to start to understand how this information needs to be delivered for all - for specialist interest groups, for special communities certainly, but also generically - in order to turn exciting technology and fascinating capabilities into usable, affordable, addictive almost, technology that we will all use.

I will be a bit more cautious this time. In 2000 I was saying by 2005 we would all be using location-based services. Perhaps this time, Chairman, if I say invite me back in ten years' time and we will see where we are, but clearly the possibilities have moved on. The technology is exciting, and I for one look forward very much to hearing the rest of the presentations today. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

JOHN GILL: Thank you very much. Are there any questions?

NEW SPEAKER: Thank you, Professor Jackson, for your presentation. I am going to be a bit Luddite here. My Nokia phone is 15 years old. I can text and phone with it. I am a bit worried because there is a scheme going now for Digital, which is helping people with Freeview, and people are going to need individual help to take on the change just of their television services.

My concern is a little bit about what we might be doing, or what we could do to help the uptake of this technology to the disadvantaged groups, to the 80-100-year-old users and to the users who are a bit technophobic. I am a bit worried.
The top-selling phone in Japan is very simple. It's got a big display, big buttons and is being bought by the older users. It's not the high-technology phone. I am just wondering how we avoid the information-rich/ information-poor divide and any pointers you have in these areas. It's a bit of a strange question but I am very worried about this one.

PROFESSOR JACKSON: I am not a specialist in the deployment of these technologies; I am a user. I am quite a conservative user - I can remember at the time thinking, "Why do I need a mobile phone? There are those red things on street corners. If I want to make a phone call, I can easily get to that red box - except the glass is always smashed out and the phone cable pulled out."

It took me quite a while before I got my first mobile phone. To be honest now, I couldn't live without it. From a business point of view, I think few people could. There will always be those who make a point of it and not use one.

You mentioned Freeview. Last night there was a programme quite late on to do with Alzheimer's disease. My wife who is a nurse wanted to watch that. Being a pleb I wanted to watch Die Hard 2 again! I said, "I will go to bed. You watch your programme, and I will watch upstairs." I got upstairs and fiddled with the television. It took me a few minutes to realise I couldn't get it because it was on ITV2 or 3 and I hadn't got Freeview upstairs.

The timescales for these transitions are actually generational, I think. They hit some parts of the community much harder than others, but by and large I think they are unstoppable. A lot of what I talked about are disruptive technologies. They inevitably produce business pain and personal pain to some extent in their introduction. When the car was introduced, it caused an awful lot of problems for people whose livelihood had centred around horses, but it happened and it was unstoppable.

I think we have to face up to that point and try to identify how to make these transitions as smooth and user-focused for everyone as possible, rather than to some extent just leaving it for the new, as it were, young generation to pick up and live with. So, sorry, it's not a straight answer. I don't know how to approach that. What I am certain of, however, is that we shouldn't be Canutes and try and stop the tide. We have to face the incoming tide of change and respond to it.

In terms of communicating, one of the things I think is very valuable is that people with disability have been forced to think through these issues of mobility much more than those of us who can just dash around the streets. At the LBS for All meeting, I mentioned to Kevin Carey that I had this great thought about my mobile phone. Mobile phones have a vibration capability for when you are in meetings.

When I am in a strange place, I hate bringing out my mobile phone to get instructions or anything because I feel immediately vulnerable. I was brought up in east London and I know that a bit of expensive-looking technology can be ripped out of your hand, and they will probably take your wallet at the same time very quickly, so I don't like to look a stranger in an area of that nature. I don't particularly want to be getting out my mobile phone trying to read a tiny little map.

Your phone knows where it is from the GPS. With simple voice commands of place names, et cetera, it can locate where you want to get to. With your slimline phone in your breast pocket, it can vibrate at different frequencies. It can vibrate at one level to turn left, another to turn right, another to go straight forward. Even if you don't need to turn left or right, it can give you a little signal just to confirm, "Yes, I know there is a turning on the left here. You know it's there but just ignore it and keep going." That gives you a sort of feedback that the device hasn't gone wrong.

I thought that was a great idea. I mentioned this to Kevin Carey. He pointed out that actually it might have some uses, but really it was the sort of micro-detailed information which was most important to somebody with a total visual incapacity, and that you needed to have much more detailed information. So, you still have to get your phone out and use an earpiece. Instructions saying you are just coming up to a pizza shop and there is a bollard on the right might be more useful than the simplistic concept I had thought of.

That dialogue will be useful, hopefully back to the community with disabilities, but certainly as a contribution to the generic development of these technologies, by forcing us to think through much more carefully the real issues of spatial cognition which are relevant to all of us.

NEW SPEAKER: Thank you. I am interested in A9.com on one of your slides. Are you aware, or could you tell the audience if it's compatible with some of the speech software that I work with such as Jaws or HAL for the visual impairment population?

PROFESSOR JACKSON: I can't answer that, I am afraid. I could probably find out for you. I have just explored it as another means of communicating information. I don't know whether it has a database into the content. If you give me your card, I can try and find out for you.

NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much.

JOHN GILL: Thank you very much, Professor Jackson, for such an interesting introduction.

Contents page