Hands-on For Handsets At Rmit
The Age
Tuesday May 2, 2000
SOMEWHERE in the School of Industrial Design at RMIT in Melbourne there may be a student struck with an idea that could revolutionise the way the world communicates in the next two or three decades.
At least that is the hope of Ericsson, the big Swedish mobile phone maker, which recently sent two of its senior industrial designers to talk to the RMIT classes about where wireless connectivity is leading and the shapes the handsets should take.
Michael Henriksson and Isabelle Degermark are responsible for the external form of the company's products and are working on the third generation of mobile phone handsets, the so-called 3G concepts, that most technology gurus say will become the principal devices of communication in a totally and constantly wired-up world.
Ericsson is giving financial support as well as design expertise to RMIT students whose work will go on display at the company's headquarters in Melbourne Central and be sent to Sweden for inclusion in the output of the concept studios there.
The third generation of mobile phone technology combines telephony with the Internet, opening the way for a bewildering range of services, from online newspapers in full color to video conferencing on the move, online shopping, banking, share trading and a myriad other functions limited only by the power of human imagination.
Henriksson is the designer and Degermark the manager of concepts at Ericsson. ``We are using the creative minds of the RMIT students as part of our concept study for 3G," Henriksson said.
Within a reasonable time, mobile phones would cease to look as they did now and would become much more visionary, he said.
``The designs would fit the human interface and would develop from the kinds of services that would become available over broadband wireless networks."
New technologies, such as WAP (wireless application protocol) and Bluetooth, the short-range wireless connectivity system, will come into play. For example, Bluetooth can be used to connect a mobile phone to a tiny hands-free earpiece and microphone, thereby removing the current entanglement of wires, or allowing conversations around an office or in a car without touching a mobile phone handset.
If, then, a mobile phone had a camera and projection system built into it, video conferencing could be carried out between individuals or among groups of people who would see each other and be seen by anyone connected through WAP.
Other ideas involve building mobile handsets into spectacles, fitting Palm Pilot-type handheld computers with mobile telephonic capability and extending the Palm to make it capable of handling live video images.
High-fidelity music would be available, via the MP3 standard, from the Internet and could be dialled up whenever it was required.
Other concepts from the Ericsson design studios are of wallet-sized devices that extend to display a flexible plastic screen of about A5 size that can receive newspaper pages and other text and graphic images.
Still others have keyboards, cameras, speakers, color touch screens and other features, all fitted into a case about the size of a VHS cassette, but slimmer.
Such devices, says Ericsson, could become the ultimate Internet devices, offering text, live video, GPS information, audio and interactivity. With Bluetooth enabling the earpiece and microphone, the mobile phone of the future could be about the size of a large keyring.
All of this was still fairly much in the future and dependent on the provision of fulltime, broadband communications at affordable prices.
``In this work with the RMIT students we are looking at the time when we will have that kind of standard," Degermark said. Data speeds of up to two megabits per second (possible with broadband CDMA) would make it possible, Henriksson said.
That lay some little distance ahead, said Joseph Lirosi, brand manager, future technologies, for Ericsson Australia. In the shorter term, speeds of, first, 115 kilobits per second (GPRS) and then 384kbps would lead the way to the third generation of mobile communications, he said. (Most GSM digital phones operate at 9.6 kbps.)
``When you get between 384 and 2mbps, realtime video becomes possible," Lirosi said.
GPRS offering full-time, constant connection was already available in Europe and was under trial in Australia. ``We will start to see it happening here towards the end of this year," he said.
The third generation of mobile telephony would become general within two years, Henriksson said. The big move from now on, would be the addition of visual information, either from an archive or in real time.
``So you will be able to see an image and talk about it at the same time, on the same connection," said Degermark. ``People will be connected all the time, wherever they are. It's a technology that opens enormous possibilities."
© 2000 The Age
