MWC: TI says forget about touch screens; try just smiling

Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) has always attempted to build into its applications more processors than the current device market is ready for in order to give its chips a longer shelf life and anticipate the multimedia and computational needs of the future, rather than just the now. The OMAP 4, which TI recently begun sampling, is no exception. TI has built reams of new functionality into its latest application processor line, but at Mobile World Congress this week it focused on one theme in particular: the ability to separate interaction and content from the device itself.

TI’s new Vision initiative literally seeks to divorce the input and output of future phones from their physical housings. It has incorporated pico projection and stereoscopic rendering technologies into the OMAP 4 platform, which can be used to project screens onto any surface and control a phones function through hand gestures, eye movement and even facial expressions.

"Imagine being able to scroll through the songs on your MP3 player by simply grinning or blinking,” said Brian Carlson, OMAP platform marketing director for TI. There are numerous use cases for the technology, Carlson added. Biometrics used as security purposes--only when your face is looking at the device will it activate—gaming, photo recognition that automatically tags photos, and social networking, just to name a few. “The point is the hardware knows exactly what to look for in a face.”

And when Carlson says hardware, he isn’t generalizing. TI is high on the idea of facial recognition in particular, and has embedded its recognition algorithms directly into OMAP’s hardware front-end. This allows facial recognition to run faster and perform more detailed facial analysis in the digital signal processor (crunching image data and radio frequency data are very similar, Carlson said.). And it also makes facial and gesture recognition available to almost any developer on the OMAP platform. Rather than develop special software platforms for facial recognition, developers with the proper development tools can add recognition into any application.

The recognition technology can also be synchronized with its projection technology, so gestures can be used to manipulate a projected interface as well as the on-screen UI. The OMAP 4 processor stereoscopic cameras create a 3D spatial link with the pico projector so, when a user points at the projected screen the device knows what it’s gesturing at. The cameras can also be used to capture object and contextual data, which cloud-based databases can interpret and be use for location-based services, commerce or even translation applications.

TI hasn’t focused merely on recognition and projection for the new platform. It has added new 3D graphics capabilities along with dual-screen support. Several of TI’s partners were on hand at Mobile World Congress demonstrating those capabilities. Among them was The Astonishing Tribe, which had developed a multi-textured video user interface that allows a user to switch between multiple simultaneously running video streams--each one on a different face of a rotating cube. Movial demoed a contextual Web browsing experience, which used one screen to display Web-search results and the other to pull up a bevy of social networking, multimedia and informational content related to the text search.