IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 6

fEatUrE artIClES
INTERNET OF
(COM)PROMISED THINGS
You cannot get away from it these days.
Even your trusty editor was press-ganged
into giving a webinar on the Internet of
Things (IoT) (try http://j.mp/PC_IoT if
you missed the show). So it is no surprise
when I tell you that we have several articles in this issue on this topic. Interestingly, both have a very similar theme-that
security and trust are central to the Internet of Things. That was also one of two
major issues I identified in my webinar.
Our first IoT author, Joseph Decuir, is
a pioneer in the gaming industry who
currently works in several industry sectors providing wireless connectivity.
More recently, he has been working on
standards development in wireless charging technology. Who better, then, to talk
about the Internet of Things and the challenges in building secure and trustworthy
embedded systems that can scale beyond
the home network? In "The Story of the
Internet of Things," there are significant
challenges, and Joe outlines these in several different examples that develop a picture of the grand challenge.
An article by Brett Mabrie, a CE Society member from the Dallas Chapter,
tackles the topic of smartphone security.
Brett provides some welcome and practical advice on how to minimize exposure
to many of the risks to which we are
increasingly exposed. This is not the first
article we have featured that examines the
risks involved with the everyday use of
our favorite device, but he is the first to
give some useful tips to avoid joining the
"compromised" Internet of Things.
Eye-Gaze has recently become popular as a user-interface mechanism for various CE devices. This issue, we have an
article from Shabab Bazrafkan, Anuradha
Kar, and Claudia Costache that reviews
the recent use of gaze as a monitoring
and actuation mechanism for a range of
CE products. In addition, they consider
some of the challenges facing eye-gaze if
it is to achieve acceptance by consumers
and become a practical and widely adopted CE technology. This article is a useful
review and analysis for those evaluating
eye-gaze for practical use-cases.
6 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

In "Future Shock," Bill Montgomery
provides a broad future vision on IoT. I
found Bill's vision very appealing in
terms of explaining the potential that
exists for IoT. He too returns to the problem of authenticating ourselves and offers
some ideas that expand beyond those in
Joe's article. Note that if you are interested in learning more, this article was
taken from Bill's blog at http://www.connectinprivate.com/blog.php where you
can read more about his ideas for securing the Internet of Things.

IMAGING AND VIDEO
TECHNOLOGIES AND STANDARDS
We have quite a collection of articles on
various aspects of video and imaging
technology. These range from an article
by Euee S. Jang, a member of the newly
formed editorial board, who looks at
future video standards and considers how
the CE industry will handle growth in
video technologies in the future. Today we
have a new standard for video, HEVC (or
H.265), that is twice as efficient as the
older MPEG-4 or H.264 in terms of compression but provides the same video
quality. Will this have the longevity to take
us beyond today's video into the future?
In "Demystifying High-DynamicRange Technology," Ronan Boitard,
Mahsa T. Pouzarad, Panos Nasiopoulos,
and Jim Slevinsky look at high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging. This technology is in all of today's smartphones and
helps improve on the limited quality of
smartphone cameras by capturing two or
more images and combining these into a
single image with an improved range of
exposure levels. What does that mean in
practice? Well, the dark parts of the
image will be less "in shadow" and the
bright parts will be less "burnt" or
"overexposed." Of course I am greatly
simplifying what HDR does, and can do,
in our devices-this article will reveal
everything you need to know about
HDR and explain some of the occasional artifacts that can be caused as well.
In "Ultra High Definition," Jeff Yurek
goes beyond pixel count and looks at
how ultra high-definition (UHD) TV
panels are being adopted at an ever-faster rate by consumer markets. A classic
chicken/egg scenario in the consumer

october 2015

industry is the adoption of new technology-it took more than a generation for
color TV to reach mainstream adoption
in the United States and only then did it
make sense for the content industry to
switch over to producing mainstream
content in color. More recently, we have
seen HD TV taking half a generation to
go mainstream and even today some
content providers charge a premium for
"full-HD" content. Enter Netflix with
4K programming; and now it is the
availability of 4K content that is suddenly driving the adoption of UHD TV panels. An interesting and timely look at
these new trends-Jeff blogs regularly at
http://www.connectinprivate.com/blog.
php, mostly about displays, pixels and
quantum dots.

PHENEMONAL
AUGMENTED REALITY
This issue we feature an article from
prolific researcher and inventor, Steve
Mann. Steve is best known for his work
on computational photography, wearable
computing and high dynamic range
imaging. He is also referred to as the
father of Augmented Reality, among his
many other credits and achievements.
In "Phenomenal Augmented Reality," Steve introduces us to the concepts
of phenomenal augmented reality and
explains how he arrived at many of
these unique ideas and concepts. He is
one of the most prolific and forwardlooking thinkers in the IEEE community and it is a great honor to feature an
article from him in IEEE Consumer
Electronics Magazine. You can read
more about Steve and his many visionary achievements and inventions at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_
Mann or if you are interested, he was
keynote at the Augmented World Expo
(AWE 2015), and you can catch his
keynote here: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=QKRTiOG4J5E. It is
well worth a few minutes of your time
to see these ideas realized in practice.
Thanks for your contribution Steve!

ConSUMEr tEChnoloGy
IMpaCtS
In this issue we have three societal
impacts articles.

http://www.j.mp/PC_IoT http://www.con http://www.nectinprivate.com/blog.php http://www.connectinprivate.com/blog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_ https://www.youtube

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015