As if cellular phones, PDAs and the new stripped-down versions of laptops called Netbooks don’t offer enough portability and features, guess what? They’re about to get a face lift.
Intel recently acquired a software company called OpenHand and with it something called “Clutter” which allows two-dimensional (2D) images to be manipulated in a three dimensional (3D) space. For the more technical among us, it’s an open source library written in C which abstracts the complexity of Open GL and Open GL ES (the embedded version) which serves as the basis for creating usage and device-specific toolkits. For the rest of us less technical end users it means a more exciting “look and feel” or user experience.
At the present time, iPhone and Blackberry Storm handhelds allow for 2D manipulation, but the manipulation is done in a 2D space. Essentially, that means the user is moving icons or elements around on a flat surface rather than a 3D space which also has depth. Moreover, the movement of elements tends to be vertical and horizontal rather than circular or freeform. From an end user perspective that means you can scroll from side-to-side or up and down but you can’t take a stack of photos, some of which are stacked upon each other and move them in whatever direction you want them to go. If you want to see what some of the Clutter concepts look like, check out the Clutter prototype demonstration.It should be noted that the Clutter prototype demonstration merely provides some examples of what can be done with Clutter, not the entire scope of what is possible to do with Clutter.
If you’re still not getting the mental picture, consider the familiar game of solitaire many of us have played on our laptops during long airplane flights. Now imagine those same cards flipping in space rather than simply being moved from one flat location to another. Now take the idea of 3D space and imagine how elements on your screen could appear: closer or farther away, rotating 360 degrees, etc. It’s going to be animation in the palm of your hand.
Clutter was originally developed because OpenHand’s CEO Matthew Allum (who is also an open source hacker) realized that the features common to desktop and laptop machines tended to show up three to five years down the road in handheld devices. If the same idea hasn’t occurred to you, think about what your iPhone or Blackberry Storm does and then compare that with what your computer did a few years ago. And don’t forget there was a time in the recent past when phones were designed specifically for phone calls – not taking photos, shooting video, ordering movie tickets and the like.
The Intel acquisition of OpenHand was a strategic one on Intel’s part as the company, being a silicon chip manufacturer, is not known for software. In fact, chip companies generally aren’t known for software because it’s not one of their core competencies.
Intel made a decisive move into the software space as it relates to portable devices with Moblin, a software foundation that is targeted at Intel’s new Atom chips, which marry high performance with low power requirements (extended battery power). Clutter, which now exists within Moblin, has already been used by Dell for its Inspiron Mini netbook, a small, low cost laptop-type computer that’s designed for surfing the Internet.
From an end user perspective, new features like 2D manipulation in 3D space “just happen”. From a design perspective, the same feature requires a lot of processing power which has an adverse affect on battery life. Since battery usage plays a large role in customer satisfaction with mobile devices it’s important to balance “wow” factors with their practical effects on battery power consumption. According to Paul Cooper, Moblin Community Manager at Intel, if designers tried to use the central processing unit (CPU aka “brains” of a device), there would be little processing power left over to run applications. Worse, battery power would be limited to a couple of hours which users wouldn’t tolerate because the CPU would have to remain on at all times.
To address this problem, Clutter executes on a graphics processing unit (GPU) which is dedicated to rendering visual effects. That leaves the CPU idle for application-based tasks such as a user typing text messages or arranging photographs.
Bottom line, if you’re an end user, you can expect mobile applications to start looking even cooler than they do now. And, you’ll probably discover some new types of applications that do not yet exist.
If you’re interested in learning more about the technical details go to http://clutter-project.org/.
