The NextGen PC Design Competition is a competition set up by Microsoft to allow people to design their idea of the next generation computer. “Influence tomorrow’s digital lifestyle with your vision of the Next-Gen PC. Change the way people pursue their passions by designing the ultimate Next-Gen Windows-based PC. Give them everything they need to do what they love, easily, powerfully, and enjoyably. Introduce the Next-Gen PC. It’s your design.”The winner is the Napkin PC. As the contest entry details explain:
The Napkin PC aims to bring out the creative passion of the user both individually and in group sessions. It encourages spreading out and allows for multiple creative workflows that can interact or just as easily stay independent. It encourages group interaction and collaboration by allowing any number of interfaces that can be passed around or pinned up, but which all communicate with a central network.
The marketing speak makes my brain wobble, but the idea, I think, is that each napkin is a touch-sensitive display of some sort, building upon the concept of colour e-paper. I find the device rather cumbersome, but that’s usually the case with concept designs. It does look unique though, that’s for sure.
Many of the entries are, I must say, rather out of this world and impossible for me to grasp. Most of them have absolutely no resemblance with today’s computers, but in spite of that, a browse through the list shows some innovative approaches to computing.
And that’s what we all want. Innovation. No matter how out-of-this-world, the computing world could use some true innovation. I take my hat off to all the people who took the time to design these freakish devices. Certainly worth a look.
The first place prize went to a flat computer screen with vista on it, and a pen for navigation. So basically the tablet PC concept Microsoft has been working on for years.
It looks like this Microsoft marketing project failed at producing something innovative or interesting. Not a big surprise I guess.
“Design the ultimate Next-Gen ***Windows-based*** PC.
( snip ) … It’s **your** design.”
So, to paraphrase Henry Ford, “you can create any design you like, as long as it runs Windows.”
“It’s your design” Oh, but hey, it must run Windows.
“Innovation” is the stuff that happens in Google’s Summer of Code. At least with that, the stuff you’re working on doesn’t have to have *Google* functionality built-in. This NextGen PC, on the other hand, must run Windows…
No thanks, MS, I’ll stick with my Linux/FreeBSD dual-boot box….
Edited 2008-06-17 23:10 UTC
Almost any computer today that will run Windows will run Linux, it’s not 1999. MS is SPONSORING the event, so of course it’s going to run Windows, but that doesn’t preclude it running Linux, or BSD, but granted, BSD is more of a crap shoot.
Edited 2008-06-18 12:33 UTC
But not any computer that runs linux will run windows, which I think was the point of the parent regarding limitations on the pc design (not only about linux though, just any other non-windows operating systems).
Edited 2008-06-18 14:43 UTC
I don’t think that was his point at all. I think we was just cranky that MS was sponsoring the event, and that the “Next-Gen” PC that the contest is about is running Windows.
Designing a computer that will only run Linux is just as bad as designing a computer that runs Windows. I like choice, and I try to buy stuff that gives me the widest range of choices. Buying a computer that can run Windows usually gets me one that will also run Linux, BSD or even a hacked OS X
I didn’t mean being limited on what operating systems you can use, but the capabilities of the OS of choice itself limiting the design.
Then again if they meant “windows” as in some imaginary not yet developed windows version, then it would indeed not matter.
Windows does not limit it’s design in any way. If anything, it’s going to push requirements up, so if you decide to run something else on it, say Debian, that things probably going to fly. Also, there will be drivers available for the widest range of hardware, so I can’t see how you come to that conclusion.
Plus it’s a contest put on by MS, if somebody want a contest to build the Next Gen PC using OSS software, they can start their own.
Sure a few of them where pretty close to what we’re using now like the pen and tablet machine but most of then where form factors that haven’t been seen before.
A few of them I’ve seen pop up in postings over on techeblog even but most of them are pretty interesting designs.
As Jake pointed out; who cares what software is running inside the hardware. You already have to buy the hardware and swap out or put your own software on it now anyhow.
oooo.. it had a screenshot of Windows.. run for the hills, the sky is falling, the sky is falling..
(And this is from someone who disagrees with 99% of MS business policies and rarely boots Windows outside of work issues hardware)
After browsing all those entries, all I see is no real imagination at all.
The napkin might come close to a ubiquitous surface but it’s almost a reality already.
I think there is something to be said for a StarTrek NG like device, you don’t see it much, just as a ubiquitous surface in every console, voice activated and with all of human knowledge behind it and some fairly futuristic AI to make conversing with it palatable. Most every Scifi spaceship has the same general scheme for good reason, I studied AI decades ago, so I know it is not going to happen in my life now, Moore’s Law just doesn’t work in software. If anything PC software is doomed to reinvent the same old bad architecture over & over, no real breakthroughs since Xerox Parc, the Web.
So far when we hear about AI we get utter drivel about sex with robots in 50years (David Levy and crowd) and other nonsense from Ray Kurzweil about morphing into AI based life forms.
Here in the real world, all I really want now is something small, low power like the EEBox running Haiku, very light and mean, no bloat and especially no hard drives to worry about. I am so tired of the 3 giant OSes out there right now, all of them sluggish on fast hardware (Windows, Ubuntu, OSX damn them all). For a display I want OLED, like the giant one that Sony has been showing, LCDs and CRTs are so very disappointing after seeing those. At least OLED is a possibility in 5 years though. Once you have these 3mm thick display substrates, putting a low power processor on the back adds almost nothing to thickness. Also Li-Ion batteries will give way to nano based Supercaps. Fortunately research in battery technology is now getting pumped up by the needs of electric vehicles.
I disagree. We aren’t seeing any real innovation (by your definition) in the hardware space either. The evolution of the mouse went 3-button at parc, 1 button at apple, return to 3 button by microsoft. When it comes to memory/CPUs, it is all based on the same tired ideas from decades ago, just faster and smaller. Both software and hardware are moving in a fairly linear progression without major revolutions or innovations.
I agree. All the “innovation” of the past few years has just consisted of making things prettier and easier to use (i.e. appealing to the masses), increasing power (i.e. appealing to those that need to process high volumes of data, e.g. businesses, scientists, NASA).
It might just be the short-sighted cynic in me, but what else is there, really? Perhaps if the answer was known it would have been done already. Granted, some nice things come out of the above things. For instance, the first might help education efforts. The second could help us save the earth from global warming, find cures for diseases, &c. What I am basically saying is that technology is a tool (duh!).
This is not to say that I don’t spend about half of my days reading tech news and playing around with my own machines. But my point is I just do it for entertainment and the “innovations” that I have seen in my (admittedly few) 10 years actively following the scene all fall into the above categories.
indeed…
if one really want to innovate now, one would have to “merge” man and machine. what if the computer could be used hands-free, on the go.
want to know the distance between two points? mark them in space and let the computer do the calculations on the spot.
signs that are translated on the fly (or maybe read from a generic barcode in a corner and then displayed in a native language on screen or hmd).
these designs are just spins on the existing desktop or laptop. its not really that much out there…
now, if one could get weight measurements via a glove and picking up the item one wants to measure, then i would call innovation. a word that have been so watered down by the war of words between the corps that its not even funny…
change the default background from a single color, to a hi rez picture? innovation, marketing screams!
Not the pop culture use of the term as a preface to denote “this is really cool, please listen too my advertising” but “Cybernetic” as a step up from Bionics which simply replicate existing human mechanical traits. As a monocular, I tend to watch advances in cybernetic eye replacement very closely though the last article I spotted was in Wired a while back.
mm.. yummy meat replacing cybereye; low light, ultra violet, infrared, flash suppression, full video recording backed by a real “lifedrive” storate database. hehe.. I’ve been daydreaming about real cybernetics since the 80s thanks to Gibson’s story settings even though I can’t bring myself to consider the surgery that is already required during install.
(When they plugged the first human trial subject into his new external cybereyes and began calibrating the interface he blacked out and didn’t wake up for a few hours. They very literally crashed his brain by overloading the optic centers and had to slow the calibration down when they tried again the next day. There is video of him later driving a car around in the parking lot for the first time since loosing vision in both eyes.)
kinda. or maybe make it external somehow.
hell, i have seen people wondering about turning some usb powered vr glasses and a umpc into some kind of proto-gargoyle (snow crash) setup.
the real problem here isnt output, but input.
as in, how do one do input on the go without having some hard surface or that require both hands? voice? while it have made some impressive advances, there is still to many errors for it being as reliable as a keyboard and mouse. especially if the subjects are commands, not just dictation.
There is “cyberman” or whatever he’s getting called these days. If I remember correctly, he’s a U of T professor who’s been dressing in a wearable computer now since before they where called such a thing. Input is mostly video recording and such modifying HUD display in the classes he wears. He even has or had a webserver running on the local system so you can tap in and check it out.
The last story I heard about him was being stopped by security at an airport and having the overbearing thugs tear the glasses and few embedded electrodes out of him resulting in damaged hardware and completely disorienting him rather badly. He’s also been stopped entering walmart and other retail outlets due to the camera mounts. They claimed he was filming without consent too which he replied; what about that “smoke detector” right there which is a model [blah] consealed video camera with no smoke detection harware in it at all?
Input is the problem there too as I think it was one of those little arm mountable keypads he was using on the go as needed. Input is really where AI could solve problems too.
I have to agree with the abiquitus OS approach. I’d still want my own seporate sandboxes to pay in but the scifi worlds where multiple hardware boxes all attach to and present the same back end OS has some real advantages.
I’ve only seen one setup so far that comes close too that where someone has about four workstations, two notbooks and a couple of PDA. It’s all controlled from a single mouse/keyboard and any window can be dragged across all displays including PDAs. I wish I had the link handy but I can’t be the only one who saw that setup. It’s like a window (not Windows), into the same clustered OS.
As for AI, the real breakthrough may be when we can code an infant AI that can modify it’s own code. A self coding AI is pretty scary to consider so hopefully Asimov provided enough theoritical consideration. I don’t see a true AI being the final product of human code as much as the product of correcting and building on our buggy languages. The Adolescence of P-1 found me before Asimov’s books did though so that’s probably part of my reasoning.
check out synergy:
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
and i have been mentally messing around with some sort of clustered computer system, where each box is its own computer but share a common i/o interface towards the user…
Edited 2008-06-18 14:48 UTC
My last upgrade was benchmarked against running multiple VM purely so I can start mucking with complete networked VMs for mucking with ldap and clustering. I can’t shake the nagging desire to cluster all my existing machines at home either; just to see what it can do though the power bills would kill me if left running I bet.
I’ll have to check out synergy. I think thatis what the person was using actually.
One day I’ll be able to just drop my PDA on the induction plat and have it charged and synced without specialized “Palm Desktop” like software.
While I like Windows, trying to put Vista on such a thin display does not make any sense to me.
I mean, is the device a new kind of “complete computer”? Or, is it a remote display only? I could understand the remote display somehow, but come on, Vista is not designed to fit in a napkin.
It’s not even possible to fit Vista on Eee level PCs (properly), and this seems to be too far fetching (even for MS).
The second slide covers that:
http://www.nextgendesigncomp.com/thumbnail.aspx?width=456&border=2&…
That may be where the “innovation” part comes in by figuring out ways to develop even smaller processing components. All part of the smaller, faster, better development path.
But… but… can you use it to create compositions that are entropic (by utilizing the syntactic isolates, of course)?
People have been smoking a lot of crack lately.
Perhaps a more useful contest could enforce the participants to be sober while creating their designs or ban designs that require alien technology.
Gotta love this trendy trend.
Have you seen some of the crazy car concept designs that people draw up, model or build outright in the case of the bigger car companies? I would have been disapointed if this contest didn’t produce completely foreign looking chassis designs.
Napkin PC = Portable version of the MS Surface
or
iPod Touch on crack.
and powered by a nuclear decay battery…
here a list of netbook
http://www.aful.org/metamorphose/ultra-portables-umpc
Sorry, but I want a napkin that will help me stay neat, not connected. It is truly sad that will all the money available in the tech industry, this is the best they can dream up. Maybe they SHOULD be taking drugs to increase their creativity. Of course, being saddled with (must run Windows) will limit how far they can push the envelope.
I thought the concept of the napkin pc was a good idea, utilising iPhone / iPod touch UI with some tweaking it could become a reality. The induction based power option was also quite clever.
I agree limiting people to an OS is a bad idea. It shouldn’t matter what the underlying OS / software is, really we want to only see the practicalities and how this system will work.
Perhaps OSNews.com should run a similar compeition and see what ideas we have floating around.
I think it’s interesting that Microsoft sponsors these types of contests. Harvesting innovating new ideas under the guise of a contest is a great way to steal others ideas without doing so outright. We all know that Microsoft lost the ability to generate new and innovating ideas on its own over a decade ago so it needs to tap the naive up and comers in the tech community; those who grew up with Microsoft (and worship it) for new concepts to steal.