Visual computing seeks to make your technology experiences look, act and feel real. When combined with broadband internet connectivity, visual computing holds great promise for connecting people within highly intuitive, interactive visual interfaces. These will enhance your ability to share experiences and information. Intel calls this new category of connected visual computing usages "Immersive Connected Experiences" or ICE.
Current examples of ICE fall into two main categories.
Simulated Environments – These are multi-user graphical environments where large numbers of people interact for the purposes of gaming, socialization, learning, or content creation. Examples include virtual worlds, massively multiplayer online games (MMORGs), and 3-D cinema.
Augmented Reality – These are environments where information from the actual world is combined with digital information from the internet. Examples include Earth mapping applications and future mobile devices that overlay graphics onto real time video to provide a digitally enhanced view of the world around you.
- Platform Optimization. ICE requires architectures that scale well as shared visual environments become more complex, realistic, and popular. These systems will require tera-scale levels of parallel processing to improve both realism and interactivity. In addition, these experiences should be portable to a range of client devices, so that one can access the same worlds using anything from a small mobile device to a high-end desktop optimized for gaming.
- Visual Content. One of the most compelling trends on the Interent is the proliferation of user-generated content. For ICE, this means we will want 3D content creation tools that are as easy to use as photo or video editing software today. This 3D content must be stored in standardized formats that allow people to reuse their content in different environments. In addition, this data-rich content must be delivered just-in-time as users explore recently modified ICE environments, raising new challenges for real-time content distribution over the Internet.
- Distributed Computation. ICE applications are distributed systems. Imagine thousands of users connected through a variety of clients to servers running simulations and hosting global resources. All the connections are potential chokepoints, and the network demands become more severe with increasing thread and core counts. Intel is researching the impact and requirements of connected visual computing technologies and usage models like ICE for future Intel platforms and engaging the community to address the distributed system architectural issues.
- Improving Mobile Experiences. Enabling truly immersive computing experiences within the power, bandwidth and intermittent connectivity constraints of a mobile internet device (MID) is a real challenge. Intel’s Carry Small Live Large research initiative includes efforts to enable Composability, in which wireless devices discover, identify and connect with other nearby computing resources such as sensors, displays, storage devices or other computers. Augmented reality is particularly compelling when combined with a mobile experience. This is the use of MIDs and sensors to give users a more immersive experience of the real world and provide additional information regarding what’s around them.
Learn more about R&D activities that will help to accelate the adoption of ICE:
