Mobile Media Making a Reality

This month's ACM Queue is centered at "Going Mobile", coincident with IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. One of the stories, "Mobile Media: Making it a Reality" is worth reading. It talks about two research projects at HP labs: one is InHand, a personal context aware mobile services that leverage RFID technology; the other is a Mobile Gaming Service Platform.

It you look at the mobile networking side of Inhand, it is nothing new: like a typical Near Field Communication system, users will be able to use a mobile device equipped with an RFID reader to access information provided by some tagged objects in proximity. The device talks to a backend server via cellular connection or WiFi.

Application scenarios include move goers swing a cell phone to a movie poster to watch the trailer, pre-order ticket; shoppers at a grocery store point a cell phone to food for a recipe and check out automatically. Or, when you are shopping at B&N, you can use your cell phone to read the ISBN code and send an SMS to a system that will return the price of the book at Amazon.com.

What distinguishes InHand from other similar projects is its context-awareness: user's information access experience is largely personalized based on her profile and other parameters such as networking conditions, device form-factor, etc. You can of course imagine this contextual information may involve advertisement. These all happen on the backend server that services the request from a cell phone that combines RFID and user information. InHand sounds like a technically workable idea, and I guess consumers would like to try this if available. But the difficult part is the business model: Assuming there is an independent content provider servicing the media, how much does this benefit the site(movie theatre, for example) that provides such facility? If the connection between the mobile device and the media server is cellular, will a user pay for this?

Multiplayer mobile gaming is getting a lot of attention recently. As the author suggested, "multiplayer games, which promote community communications, tend to engender gaming loyalty". The MSPP platform is based on the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) of 3GPP, which is covered in my book "Smart Phone and New-Generation Mobile Computing". Two major challenges exist: transport layer requirements for mobile gaming where TCP and UDP do work well, and gaming service user interface design in association with presence service and person-to-person communication using real/virtual identify in real/gaming world. In addition, end to end security can only be achieved if the media proxy who is responsible for transcoding (adapting streams for client capabilities and time varying network conditions) do not need to decrypt the steam in order to transcode. The researchers at HP labs have proposed a scheme called "Secure Transcoding" for this purpose.

There is no doubt that mobile gaming could be a kill app for 3G data services-just look at online gaming.; but it still stays at the vision phase-no such services are available now-voice is still No1. Cell phone's tiny screen is certainly a problem, which makes me think about putting text-based games such as Mud in the first place when it comes to mobile gaming.

On the other hand, group gaming, i.e., players using WiFi or Bluetooth to play in a physically proximate setting may get some traction, especially when you consider Sony PSP and Gameboy DS's networking capability in terms of ad hoc communication.