OFFICIAL NEWSPAPER OF
www.iseurope.org
Tuesday 10 February 2015 SHOW HOURS:
Tuesday 10 February 09:00-18:00
Wednesday 11 February 09:00-18:00
ISE is a joint venture partnership of:
Thursday 12 February 09:00-17:00
The future: Integrated System Europe? BY MONICA HECK The Internet of Things is set to turn the ‘integrated systems’ that make up Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) into a single unified ‘integrated system’, according to futuristic business mastermind and consultant Lars Thomsen. Speaking on the main stage during the ISE Opening Keynote speech, Thomsen predicted the future of the AV industry would depend on the IPv6 Internet standard, which would create a rapidly growing “digital nervous system” across the world not unlike the current energy grid everybody is used to. “In 10 years, 1,000 devices per human will be connected to the internet and this digital nervous system will incorporate all aspects of things that are important to humanity,
Thomsen: “In 10 years, 1,000 devices per human will be connected to the internet” such as comfort, energy, security, education and so on,” he said. “Right now there are different halls in this trade show representing different parts of the industry. We are now at a tipping point where we
don’t have to think about isolated systems, but rather about moving onto a system that incorporates the internet as its backbone.” Tipping points are a key concern of Thomsen’s, who doesn’t use slides
during his keynotes but prefers to let the audience connect the dots and imagine the future he describes. “Tipping points are points in time where a new technology, or business model is cheaper and better than the way we did it in the past,” added Thomsen, listing the victory of artificial intelligence and robotics over ‘dumb technology’ as tipping points to look out for. “Within 520 weeks, we will get to a point where robots can work in households or in elderly care, they will reach a price point where they are cheaper than employing humans for the same task. The implications to our society are big.” “We have to do more than just look for trends, instead of waiting for the future we have to find the next tipping point and actively create that future,” he concluded.
A minority report on the future of pixels BY LINDSEY M. ADLER A vacuum in professional computing has resulted from the evolution from desktop to laptop to mobile device. John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries, views the world through pixels and sees them as the key to filling that hole, which he shared in his Smart Building Conference address: “The Future of Work – Workplace Collaboration Thrives in the Spatial Operating Environment”.
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As an advisor to the film Minority Report, Underkoffler shared a clip he musingly hoped was “the last time we have to look at this.” Instead of being wowed by the ahead-of-its-time gesture technology, something he derided as “not what’s important,” attendees were asked to look for what was missing. “This sequence is as much about the collaboration and the room as it is the UI.” Applying that to today’s business technologies, he asked,
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“How does computation extend [the] room? It doesn’t. [Modern computing devices] don’t care about the room. You have a bizarre complication.” Because they are so personal in nature, “They are anti-collaboration devices and anti-architectural devices.” Underkoffler and Oblong Industries are working to get out of this “trap.” His solutions include: the more pixels the better; pixel interoperability; a user interface capable of managing all the pixels all over the place; and plurality, the
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need for systems that think about more than one thing - enabling the physical and social space for more than one person to work in tandem. By teaching a machine to speak pixels, multiple applications can run at the same time complementarily. “It’s a kind of quantum leap between what you can do with a machine,” Underkoffler declared. “We’re turning serialism into parallelism, linear into nonlinear, and raw technology into a more human approach.”
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A DIGITAL THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
ISE’ managing director Mike Blackman introduces the event as Chiara Benedettini of organiser Connessioni looks on
BY KIRSTEN NELSON It was “laptop land” at AudioForum@ISE yesterday. The fifth edition of the day-long educational event presented by Connessioni certainly featured digital in every way, as nary a professional audio discussion would be complete without talk of software or DSP. Topics relevant to audio design, integration and live events were discussed in the context of building knowledge and business for a rapidly evolving industry, with participants taking keen interest in sharpening skills in modeling, time alignment, networking and Class D amplification. Attendees from the live sound and installation worlds convened at the event. The notion of convergence was very much on the mind of Jack Cornish, a project
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