Touch and smell phone

Correspondents
APRIL 27, 2004  

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,9374926%5e15841%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html
 
SPEAKING without using vocal chords, knowing which
direction a phone call comes from and communicating
with the five senses are among the visions of Japanese
researchers for future mobile phones.

Cloistered in their ultra-modern laboratories a
90-minute drive south of Tokyo, about 900 engineers
work on research and development for Japan's leading
mobile phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo. 
Among them, researchers in the mobile communications,
multimedia and network laboratories dream up
applications of the future, not just for
fourth-generation mobile telephony (4G), but for 5G as
well. 

"We are working on the five senses," DoCoMo multimedia
laboratories managing director Toshio Miki says.
"Smell and taste will probably be the most difficult."


DoCoMo's 3G service, FOMA, the world's first, launched
in October 2001, with a data transmission speed of
384Kbps, makes it possible to talk by video link or to
look at an internet site while talking on the phone. 

DoCoMo's next target is to achieve a speed of 100Mbps
for 4G by 2010, and the researchers demonstrate some
of the functions they hope to introduce in that time. 

One of them would turn the mobile phone into a sort of
tracking device to help find a friend in a crowded
public place with no landmarks — something for which
present phones are of limited use. It would do this by
re-creating the sense of directional sound with the
help of a global positioning system. 

The other caller's voice would appear to come from the
left or right, in front or behind, to correspond with
the location in relation to the listener. 

If the function was one day incorporated into a
commercially available handset, it could make a
three-way audio-conference more natural and lively and
easier to follow. 

For example, the voice of a speaker in Hokkaido,
northern Japan, would seem to come from the north for
a person in Tokyo, and that of someone in
south-western Kyushu would seem to come from that
direction. 

When using the videophone, the user would get the
impression the sound was actually coming from the
mouth of the person on the screen. 

The concept, which is in the first stages of research,
is demonstrated by using headphones to listen to music
while walking around a room. 

Another project is research on the ability to
recognise speech simply from the movement of facial
muscles without voicing any sounds. 

The application could prove useful when discretion is
required, silence must be observed, or there is too
much background noise. 

After three years, DoCoMo has reproduced all five
Japanese vowels with a voice synthesiser or onscreen
by applying electrodes to the cheek, between the nose
and the upper lip and under the chin. 

The company is working on reproducing the much larger
number of consonants, which could prove more
difficult. English sounds are also included in the
study. 

With more than 45 million subscribers, three million
of them using the FOMA 3G service, DoCoMo employs
about 1100 engineers on research and development in
Japan, with an annual budget of about Y120 billion
($1.49 billion). 

It is conducting major research into mobile telephone
hardware and setting the specifications for handset
manufacturers, DoCoMo spokesman Nobuo Hori says. 

"We are in very close relationships with handset
manufacturers," he says. "We, at DoCoMo, are taking
the initiative. It is a different situation compared
with European countries." 

AAP