New Chip to Bring Holograms to Smartphones

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky contraption to your head.

Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie "Star Wars."

A key to this future may lay in Carlsbad, Calif., where startup Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3-D images for smartphones and giant screens.

Other companies have shown they can project floating images that appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles. For instance, the lifelike image of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, which graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012, was a combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.

An Ostendo chip with an affixed lens
sitting in the palm of a hand. Evelyn M. Rusli for The Wall Street Journal

Ostendo's projectors, in contrast, are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the color, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.

"Display is the last frontier," said Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in 1998 sold CommQuest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.41% for about $250 million in cash and stock. "Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display."

The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to life.

Ostendo's chief executive and founder,
Hussein S. El-Ghoroury in Carlsbad,
California, on Thursday. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal!

Microsoft Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are both working on their own virtual reality rooms, building a complex system of projectors and computers. Hewlett-Packard Co. recently spun out a company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3-D imaging to smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. agreed in March to spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR Inc., maker of the Oculus Rift headset that pulls users into 360-degree virtual environments.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, in part, convinced of the value of virtual reality after he accidentally tried to set down a real world object on a virtual table while testing the Oculus Rift, forgetting for a moment that the table didn't exist in the real world, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Ostendo, tucked away in Southern California, is little-known but has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, and has secured some $38 million in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of that has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the government's futurist agency that worked on the predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.

That capital has given Dr. El-Ghoroury, an immigrant from Egypt, the luxury to work for nearly a decade undisturbed. Ostendo now employs about 115 people, including scientists suited in scrubs and goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech semiconductor lab.

Researchers with Ostendo Technologies, Inc.
work in a nanotechnology lab on Thursday to
manufacture Quantam Photonic Imager chips that
can produce holograms. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal

The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name, which fuses an image processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, alongside software that helps the unit properly render images.

During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air. The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer.

According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT's Media Lab, Ostendo's advantage and the key to its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch, Ostendo's chips are at about 5,000 dots per inch.

Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers, expects the first 2-D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability, in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.

Dr. El-Ghoroury said the company still needs to improve the 3-D product and is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolution.

Ultimately, the larger vision is to have Ostendo's chips everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a glasses-free 3-D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.

So what happens in a world where 3-D and virtual reality is everywhere? Dr. El-Ghoroury predicts people's relationship with technology will change and breed a wave of business opportunities, on scale with the introduction of the iPhone.

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3-D—all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data," he said.

Association Says Indoor E911 Location Technology Not Ready

As reported by GPS World: In a recent FCC filing, the Telecommunications Industry Association said that indoor positioning technology is not sufficiently developed to support ongoing wireless E-911 location accuracy requirements.

While TIA supports the FCC’s goal to improve location accuracy, “Imposing location accuracy mandates at this time would be premature, given the nascent stage of the technology that will be needed to accomplish the Commission’s objectives, and should neither favor nor disfavor specific technologies,” said the association in its filing.

The NPRM proposes a requirement to achieve “rough” indoor location information, TIA said. It proposes to require providers to provide horizontal information for wireless 911 calls that originate indoors, specifically a caller’s location within 50 meters.

TIA also disagrees with an FCC proposal to require mobile operators to provide z-axis, which is vertical location within 3 meters of a caller’s location, for 67 percent and 80 percent of indoor wireless 911 calls — ranging from three to five years after adoption. Again, TIA says that the technology is not fully developed.

TIA quoted AT&T’s filing: “[The] time [is] right to begin discussing Indoor Location Accuracy for E-911” but the “FCC should be careful to ensure that any proposed rules on location accuracy are aligned with proven capabilities of the current state of technology and they should set realistic accuracy benchmarks that the industry and public safety can embrace.”

The location industry has been counting on indoor positioning, with its beacons and Wi-Fi enhancements, to jump-start a location-based services market that always seems to have tremendous potential, but the numbers don’t back it up. Some big-time analysts have said that while the promise of indoor positioning is huge, it just isn't there technically yet.

In fact, one analyst said that the biggest technological breakthrough last year was indoor mapping. Such major retailers as Home Depot and Lowes launched indoor maps with product search locators. These same analysts say that indoor Wi-Fi positioning is not accurate enough for macro location.

The big deal coming up is how FCC positioning accuracy regulations will affect beacons or Bluetooth low energy for micro location and proximity services.

TIA said it supports initial FCC location accuracy requirements back to 2007. However, don’t ask TIA for more location regulation. “To date, the development of 911 and E911 location accuracy technologies and applications has been fostered by a voluntary and consensus-based standards process. This process has proven quite successful to date, and the Commission should refrain from imposing regulations that could slow additional development,” the association said.

LAPD Adds Drones to Their Arsenal

As reported by the LA Times:The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired some eyes in the sky.

On Friday, the department announced that it had acquired two "unmanned aerial vehicles" as gifts from the Seattle Police Department.

The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a camera, video camera and infrared night-vision capabilities.

In making the announcement, however, department officials were at pains to make it clear the LAPD doesn't intend to use the new hardware to keep watch from above over an unsuspecting public. If they're used at all, the remotely controlled aircraft will be called on only for "narrow and prescribed uses" that will be made clear to the public, the statement said.

That, according to LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Andrew Smith, would include situations involving barricaded suspects or hostages in which police need to see inside a building as they decide how to respond.

"We wanted to be really up-front with the public that we're looking at using these down the road," Smith said. "We wanted to make sure it didn't look like we were trying to sneak these things into action."



Wanting to avoid the negative connotations the word has taken on, the department's statement deliberately avoided referring to the aircraft as drones.

The LAPD's skittishness underscores concerns over privacy and other sensitivities that have come up in recent years as police departments around the country have begun to experiment with surveillance technology.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department recently came under fire for flying a small airplane equipped with high-powered cameras over Compton for several days without alerting the city's residents of the video dragnet.

Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, praised the LAPD for being up-front about the acquisition, but raised concerns about the department using them, even in a limited fashion. The potential for abuse, he said, was high.

Villagra highlighted news reports showing Seattle officials abandoned the idea of using the aircraft after a public outcry over them.

The ACLU, he said in a statement, "questions whether the marginal benefits...justify the serious threat to privacy an LAPD drone program could pose."

Google to Spend $1B on a Fleet of 180 Satellites Providing Internet Access to Remote Areas

As reported by Market Watch: Details remain in flux, the people said, but the project will start with 180 small, high-capacity satellites orbiting the earth at lower altitudes than traditional satellites, and then could expand.

Google’s satellite venture is led by Greg Wyler, founder of satellite-communications startup O3b Networks Ltd., who recently joined Google with O3b’s former chief technology officer, the people said. Google has also been hiring engineers from satellite company Space Systems/Loral LLC to work on the project, according to another person familiar with the hiring initiative.  

The projected price ranges from about $1 billon to more than $3 billion, the people familiar with the project said, depending on the network’s final design and a later phase that could double the number of satellites. Based on past satellite ventures, costs could rise.

Google’s project is the latest effort by a Silicon Valley company to extend Internet coverage from the sky to help its business on the ground. Google and Facebook Inc. are counting on new Internet users in underserved regions to boost revenue, and ultimately, earnings.

“Google and Facebook are trying to figure out ways of reaching populations that thus far have been unreachable,” said Susan Irwin, president of Irwin Communications Inc., a satellite-communications research firm. “Wired connectivity only goes so far and wireless cellular networks reach small areas. Satellites can gain much broader access.”

Google also is hoping to take advantage of advances in antennas that can track multiple satellites as they move across the sky. Antennas developed by companies including Kymeta Corp. have no moving parts and are controlled by software, which reduces manufacturing and maintenance costs.

This isn't Google's first attempt at connecting remote parts of the world, last year's Project Loon saw Google launch 30 balloons that offer 3G-like speeds in the areas of New Zealand that have no Internet connection.  The satellite project is a possible extension of Project Loon.  Google's Internet balloons have been recently linked to UFO reports.

Google also recently purchased drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace to deliver high-altitude solar-powered drones that can stay airborne for five years at a time.

Facebook is also challenging for space in the unconnected world with its own project, which is being run by its Connectivity Lab.  In a statement earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook wants to "beam Internet to people from the Sky" and that his goal is to bring "affordable access to basic Internet services available to every person in the world".

Facebook has been hoarding experts and companies to turn this idea into reality.  It has been working with scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Ames Research Center.  There's also the UK-based solar-powered drone company Ascenta, which Facebook recently purchased as part of its Internet org initiative.                                       

                                         

GPS Ground Stations in Russia Can’t be Used For ‘Military Purposes’

As reported by RT: Russia has “taken under control” the operation of 11 American GPS sites and ensured they cannot be used for military purposes, as Washington and Moscow show no progress in negotiations on setting up Russian GLONASS stations on US territory.  

May 31 was the last day when Russia and the US could have reached a deal on the issue.  

“In compliance with the Russian government’s instruction, Roscosmos and the Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations implemented measures on June 1, 2014, which excluded the use of information from global seismographic network stations working on signals from the GPS system and located on the territory of the Russian Federation for purposes not stipulated by the existing agreements, including for military purposes,”Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said on Sunday morning.

The statement referring to agreements between Russia and the US, which date back to 1993 and 2001, stirred up some confusion in the media with some outlets reporting GPS stations work has been suspended, while other said they continued to work. Russia's deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, the official behind the move elaborated:

"We have worked out and implemented measures that exclude the use of these [GPS] stations for military purposes. Now they are under our full control," Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries, wrote in his Twitter micro blog.

The Differential GPS ground stations located on Russia’s soil will continue to operate under existing agreements to fulfill civil purposes. The so-called DGPS provides differential corrections to a GPS receiver in order to improve position accuracy.

The correction is received by the roving GPS receiver via either a radio signal or a satellite signal, depending on whether a source is land-based or satellite-based, and applied to the position it is calculating.

According to Rogozin, Moscow has initiated talks with the United States on GLONASS deployment on the US territory.

If agreement is reached by the August-31 deadline, "new decisions will be taken."

“We hope that by the end of summer, these talks will bring a solution that will allow our cooperation to be restored on the basis of parity and proportionality,” Rogozin said back on May 13, the day when he first announced plans to shut down 11 American correctional GPS stations.

The development of the GLONASS global navigation system began in the Soviet Union, which put the very first satellite of the system into orbit on October 12, 1982. The system was officially commissioned on September 24, 1993.

Today GLONASS is supported on products from world-leading handheld device producers, such as Samsung, Nokia, Apple, Motorola and others, simultaneously with GPS.

So far there are 14 monitor stations in Russia, one in Brazil and one in Antarctica at Russia’s Bellingshausen station.

More GLONASS stations are expected to be built in the nearest future: eight in Russia, two in Brazil, one in Australia, Cuba, Indonesia, Spain, Vietnam and an additional station in the Antarctic.

Uber Gets Cozy with AT&T

As reported by GigaOm: Typically we look at preloaded apps on our smartphones as carrier bloatware to be deleted or minimized, but a lot of people will have second thoughts about removing AT&T’s newest promoted app from their handsets. Starting this summer, Uber will come preloaded on all new Android phones sold by AT&T.  

That isn't the extent of Uber’s new relationship with Ma Bell, Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalankick said at the Code Conference in LA. Uber is moving its own drivers onto AT&T’s voice and data networks. The iPhones Uber distributes to all of its contractors will be configured for AT&T, which, according to Uber’s blog, will give it the coverage it needs to expand beyond its current urban city focus into the far flung corners of the U.S.:

Uber’s goal is to make sure that anyone can open the Uber app anywhere and be able to connect with a safe, reliable and seamless ride through the Uber app. We are marching toward UberEVERYWHERE, and to do it, we are moving beyond expansion to individual cities and simply toward coverage, maximizing the reach of the Uber network. Today, the Uber platform serves over 137,000,000 Americans (43% of the population in just 4 years) and AT&T will help power UberEVERYWHERE and our continued expansion.

AT&T lately has been delving deep into the connected car lately powering the 3G and 4G connections linking Tesla, GM, Audi and many other automakers’ new infotainment and telematics systems. In many ways the deal with Uber is an extension of that strategy. Most of the Uber fleet may be unconnected but the drivers in them certainly are.

Though neither Uber nor AT&T went into specific details, AT&T may be providing more than just rote 3G and 3G links. It could be providing fleet tracking and logistics services that would help Uber manage its driver operations on a national scale.

As for the preloaded app, it’s really more a marketing relationship than a technology partnership. Carriers strike these deals with app developers all the time, and even if the app icon is on the home screen, AT&T customers will still have to register and load their credit card details into the app. But this deal could definitely put Uber in front of a lot more eyeballs previously unfamiliar with the car-hailing service, especially outside the core metropolitan areas Uber has traditionally focused on.

Game of Phones: How Verizon is Gaming the FCC and Its Customers

As reported by The Verge: Tomorrow, the FCC starts deciding the future of the internet. It’s an emotional, controversial, drawn-out battle that has been building for years, pitting some of the biggest internet providers in the world against the government, American citizens, and virtually every denizen of the web.

At issue is how (or if) the FCC will protect the internet’s openness, free of special treatment and data “fast lanes” offered to the highest bidders. And while Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and others have been clamoring to prevent heavy regulation from being considered this week, it turns out that communications providers have actually been working the system for years, using exactly this kind of regulation to their advantage. In fact, strict FCC rules have helped Verizon build a largelyunregulated network — a network that’s valued in the tens of billions of dollars.

Today New York’s Public Utility Law Project (PULP) published a report, authored by New Networks, which contains previously unseen documents. It demonstrates how Verizon deliberately moves back and forth between regulatory regimes, classifying its infrastructure either like a heavily regulated telephone network or a deregulated information service depending on its needs. The chicanery has allowed Verizon to raise telephone rates, all the while missing commitments for high-speed internet deployment.

It’s a mess — and, by all appearances, it’s completely legal.

UNBUNDLING THE RULES
Communication regulation is a century-old notion, spurred by the early 20th century’s dominance of AT&T in telephony (and RCA in radio). The concept was simple enough: in exchange for an effective monopoly over a medium that was quickly becoming vitally important, AT&T was subject to a unique level of government oversight. These regulations were eventually organized into the Communications Act of 1934 — a set of laws that dictated American communications policy virtually unchanged for over 60 years.

In submitting to regulation, AT&T was designated a "common carrier" — in broad terms, an organization that will deliver something from anyone to anyone else — under a critical section of the Communications Act called Title II. When the Communications Act was updated in 1996, it appeared that broadband internet providers might fall under the same strict rules, but after a series of hearings, the FCC ultimately ruled in 2002 that cable modems were "information services," a far less restrictive designation. In 2005, it ruled that DSL fell into the same category; today, effectively all internet connections are beyond the reach of Title II.

In the early years of home broadband, before the nightmare that now rests on the FCC’s desk, deregulation seemed to be a fruitful strategy: communications companies pumped billions into constructing new high-speed internet networks. Verizon negotiated an agreement to wire the entire state of New Jersey, promising every citizen in its territory would have access to high-speed internet by 2010. In New York, things were done more locally; New York City, for example, struck a deal with Verizon to get broadband to all five boroughs by this year. A similar process played out in states and cities across the US.

When Verizon talked about this broadband infrastructure with local regulators, however, it made clear it would lay the fiber for its next-generation network as a "common carrier pursuant to Title II of the Communications Act of 1934." In other words, Verizon was making a move that, at a glance, seems counterintuitive: it asked for more regulation by building its fiber network under the same tight rules as the old telephone lines.

CARRIER CHAMELEON
Why would Verizon — which, like all big telecom companies, is generally averse to government regulation — make a point of repeatedly noting that its fiber network fell under the same strict rules as the telephone system?

There are two reasons. First, Title II designation gives carriers broad power to compel other utilities — power, water, and so on — to give them access to existing infrastructure for a federally controlled price, which makes it simpler and more cost-effective for cables to be run. And that infrastructure adds up: poles, ducts, conduits running beneath roads, the list goes on. Second, Title II gave Verizon a unique opportunity to justify boosting telephone rates in discussions with regulators, arguing that these phone calls would run over the same fiber used by FiOS, Verizon’s home internet service. According to PULP’s report, Verizon raised traditional wired telephone rates in New York some 84 percent between 2006 and 2009, blessed by regulators in return for its "massive investment in fiber optics."

Of course, telephone service isn’t the real reason Verizon has spent billions on fiber: landlines have long been a dying business, expedited on their trip to the grave by the smartphone revolution of the past decade. Rather, the fiber was laid to carry data — the very data Verizon doesn’t want subject to Title II regulation. It’s for FiOS in the home and for wireless backhaul, the backbone that connects cellular towers (including Verizon Wireless’ own) to the internet.
And as landline telephones lose ground to newer, better, and faster technologies, the folks left on these copper wires disproportionately skew toward low-income populations and the elderly — the demographics least likely to be able to take advantage of broadband. Yet it was their rate increases that were being used to subsidize the investment in Verizon’s fiber network. The PULP report estimates these rate increases have generated $4.4 billion in additional revenue for Verizon in New York alone, money that’s funneled directly from a Title II service to an array of services that currently lie beyond Title II’s reach.

It’s a tactic that isn’t illegal, and Verizon itself has made no particular effort to hide it. Speaking at an investor conference in 2012, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo spelled it out: "…the fact of the matter is Wireline capital — and I won’t get the number but it’s pretty substantial — is being spent on the Wireline side of the house to support the Wireless growth. So the IP backbone, the data transmission, fiber to the cell, that is all on the Wireline books but it’s all being built for the Wireless Company."
Asked about the use of the common carrier designation, a Verizon spokesman told The Verge that for the purposes of constructing the network, it relied on the authority it had by offering Title II telephone services, but that the services it offers over that fiber — voice, cable, and high speed internet — are each legally distinct for purposes of deciding regulatory status.

HAVING IT BOTH WAYS
Still, the tactic strikes many as hypocritical. "The network has to be built as a common carrier network, because there is no way to get that infrastructure in place without it," says Earl Comstock, a lawyer at Eckert Seamans specializing in net neutrality who helped draft the Telecommunications Act of 1996. "Verizon knows it needs to offer just enough basic voice services on its fiber to claim that designation. But it doesn’t live up to those promises when it’s done building it out."
The regulatory flip-flop might be easier to justify if Verizon did indeed wire every home with fiber; in New Jersey, for instance, it had committed to delivering 45Mbps internet service to its entire territory by 2010. But numerous reports suggest Verizon hasn’t come even close to reaching its goals. In the state, which has 3.2 million households, Verizon said in March its fiber-to-the-home deployment has "passed 2.1 million premises," a number that means even less than two-thirds of homes may actually be connected. To close the gap, Verizon has leaned on its own LTE service where fiber hasn’t reached, even though it’s far slower than a wired fiber connection and is subject to data caps.

With broadband internet’s anemic competitive landscape, this lack of regulatory accountability becomes even more troubling. According to a 2012 FCC report, roughly 27 percent of US households had only one choice to get a wired connection of 6Mbps or greater. Uncompetitive markets are the ripest for regulation; the dominant players in those markets, of course, would disagree. And while we wait to see whether the FCC will move to bring the internet under Title II to codify it as the public utility that is has become, Verizon and others are playing a regulatory shell game, spinning in and out of Title II rules at their leisure.

"The last 15 years have been pretty much great for everyone; it is AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast who want to break from current patterns and impose a de-facto tax on the rest of the internet economy, starting with internet video," says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia specializing in communication networks, in a conversation with The Verge. "To do that, the FCC needs the authority to ban degradation, fast lanes, and other ways of imposing a tax on the internet economy; the clearest source of such authority is Title II of the Telecom Act. It shows how obvious it is that broadband has become a utility, when, if your reporting is correct, Verizon itself sees it that way."

This comes to a head on Thursday, when the FCC is set to unveil the draft of its proposal for new rules that govern regulation (or non-regulation) of the internet. "If the FCC fails, and allows the [fast lane] tax to be imposed, every business on the internet will pay more to the carriers, ultimately raising the costs to consumers, and making it harder to start something new," says Wu. "Nothing about that world is good for anyone."

Among other options, a full-on move to Title II regulation for the internet will be on the FCC’s menu this week. Considering how Verizon has leaned on Title II to build and finance its broadband network, the right move seems clear to some. "To expect that you can come in and use public infrastructure and funds to build a network and then be free of any regulation is absurd," says John Bergmayer, a senior staff attorney at advocacy group Public Knowledge. "When Verizon itself is describing these activities as a Title II common carrier, how can the FCC look at broadband internet and continue acting as though it's not a telecommunication network?"