Nokia Research Center (NRC) brings latest innovations to Nokia World, Stuttgart, September 2-3

At Nokia World 2009 in Stuttgart, Germany, Nokia Research Center unveiled four entirely new concepts and is showing the latest updates on two further research areas.

The demos this year were from NRC's research focused on New User Interface and Rich Context Modeling and illustrate examples of exciting experiences consumers will have in future by demonstrating the technology, interfaces and infrastructure that will enable this to happen.

From a highly intuitive User Interface tool which lets you keep in touch with your friends activites across a number of social media networks (Linked Internet UI concept), to an ultra low power local radio technology which enables super fast wireless content transfer from a retail sales writer to a mobile phone (Nokia Explore and Share), to tools which enable governments to track and fight the spread of contagious diseases such as malaria or dengue fever (HealthRadar), NRC's research is solving many different questions today. Also in the line up of demos this year were a community enhanced traffic system with customized traffic services (Traffic Works) and a new and faster method of character input which will dramatically improve the writing experience for millions of Chinese consumers (Chinese Handwriting Recognition and Calculator) or an entirely new way of connecting in the physical and digital world (Nokia Mixed Reality); all future technology visions made possible by NRC.

To experience tomorrow's technology today the visitors could visit the Nokia Research Center booths at Nokia World. If you did not have a chance to be there, check out the descriptions below for more information.

Linked Internet UI Concept

The Linked Internet UI concept allows users to keep track of the most relevant on-line activity of their contacts, no matter which service they are using (for email, music or social networking). This intelligent UI understands the content and allows you to navigate relevant, related content from your closest contacts, across multiple services.

This concept brings a new paradigm for Web and mobile interaction and offers users a unique experience by providing all online social media content in one simple and intuitive user interface, making it easy to track on-line activities for all your contacts. This intuitive service also learns your preferences so you don't need to spend time setting up your favorites.

Traffic works

The environmental and human stress impact of traffic and the time spent commuting between locations triggered Nokia Research Center studying the use of mobile devices to mitigate the impact.

Through real-time trials and combining research efforts, Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto and the University of California, Berkeley's California Center for Innovative Transportation are studying how best to collect and report back real-time traffic flow data from GPS-enabled mobile phones while protecting phone users privacy.

Traffic Works is done in collaboration with Navteq.

Explore and Share

Nokia Research Center (NRC) in partnership with CEA-LETI has developed Explore and Share. This concept enables a new way of selling and delivering services at retail. The demonstration shows how you can download Nokia content like music or videos easily and quickly onto a device.

This new ultra low power local radio technology enables an ultra fast wireless content transfer from a retail sales writer to a mobile device. The technology forms a secure short-range connection between the writer and device without using any other radio network. With this technology it is possible to download a full MP3 music album just in 10 seconds to a mobile device.

HealthRadar

Nokia is committed to tangibly improving the lives of millions of people living in emerging economies with targeted solutions. These help for example fighting the spreading of contagious diseases such as the swine flu.

Nokia HealthRadar is a Nokia Research Center project developed in India together with Manipal University. HealthRadar enables reporting and tracking the spreading of contagious diseases thus helping medical authorities in their efforts of mitigating the negative impact on the population.

Nokia Mixed Reality

Meaningful living through a fusion of physical and digital worlds.

This concept allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch. Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.

Chinese Continuous Handwriting Recognition and Handwriting Calculator

Moving beyond the single character input of today's handwriting tools, NRC Beijing has developed a method to capture continuous handwriting that will dramatically improve the experience for millions of Chinese consumers.

Intelligent handwriting recognition allows users to continuously handwrite Chinese characters, while errors are corrected automatically. This new program not only improves UI usability, but also increases recognition accuracy through character segmentation compared to a single-character handwriting recognition program.

Handwriting Calculator

As a further benefit of the handwriting recognition development coming out of Beijing, the scientific handwriting calculator supports Nokia touch-screen devices, and allows you to write complex equations on-screen, which are not only converted to standard mathematics, but the equations are also solved! This is an application that has been pre-installed in Nokia N97.

About NRC

Nokia Research Center (NRC) explores technology frontiers, solving scientific challenges today, for Nokia to deliver irresistible personal experiences tomorrow. To fulfill its mission, NRC leverages a global open innovation network of research collaborations with universities, research institutes and other technology companies. At present NRC has research framework agreement with twelve leading universities across the world. For more information, visit http://research.nokia.com