Visualise these: Browsing internet on your personal computer orally and not by touching it! Finding out the genuineness of the educational certificates of your new employee by just switching on your computer instead of walking to the university campus and allowing your PC-TV (personal computer and television set) to read your mood and change channels accordingly without bothering you to reach out for the remote-control!
Well, these might read like the script of a techno-fantasy movie, but the fact is that a group of researchers at the HP Labs in Bangalore are actually working towards making concepts like these a reality.
"Of the 30 large projects taken up by 23 HP Labs spread over seven cities in the world, the Bangalore facility is working on three," informs HP Labs Director Ajay Gupta.
The three projects Bangalore facility is working on are integration of paper and digital world, simplification of mobile web by using computer fundamentals to understand the behavioural pattern of the user and to improve gestural interaction with machines.
"Our motivation has been the emerging markets like India," Gupta said adding that one third of the work pertains to breakthrough exploratory work, one third to application research and the remaining to advanced product engineering.
HP's global investment on research and development is $3.6 billion and is centred on five major themes: Information explosion (creating more content and delivering right information to users), Dynamic cloud clusters (developing web platforms that are dynamically personalised to the users), Content transformation (transferring physical and analogue date into digital content), Intelligent infrastructure (designing smarter and secure networks that connect individuals to content) and Sustainability (developing technologies for lower carbon economy).
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"We are looking at the biggest challenges industry is to face in the next decade and work towards addressing them," Gupta said. On integration of paper and digital world, Gupta said work is being done on embedding digital signatures paper to reduce fraud. As paper documents will be barcoded, the user can get to check its veracity of the documents on the web. The barcoding technology is being tested by the IIITs on the marksheets it issues to its students. Countries like Russia have shown interest in the technology," he said.
On gestural interaction, Gupta said: "Just imagine when you just have to wave your hands in front of the monitor to go to the next page. We are looking at making technology that simple."
HP has recently launched its touchscreen PCs. Fully aware of the role of mobile web services in future, HP is working on simplifying the working of the technology.
Some of the recent innovations from the HP stable include hybrid chip architecture for low-power and high-performance computing and smart skin patch for painless injections and Mscape tool kit for creating location-based games and tours.