Nordic conference - the deaf in information society
Helsinki 1.-5.4.1998
Risto Linturi
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be given this occasion to share my thoughts and experiences with You. I am actually happy to be given this occasion because so many new thoughts crossed my mind when I started thinking about what I could tell you that would interest you.
I will talk about the future of telecommunications. If all goes well it will certainly be more to your taste than the present. I will show you several demonstrations on what we have accomplished but I will not only talk about our accomplishments and plans. I try to share with you some visions of the future technologies that will help communications between us who use different languages - whether spoken, written or sign languages.
Then I want to share with you also some of my doubts. There are many different ways how to implement these new networks. Some are good for many communications purposes, others are only good for viewing mass media. There are also many different ways how to regulate all these new possibilities. Consequenses of wrong desicions may be very severe on the society as a whole.
We have all benefited much from the internet. Electronic mail has become very important part of everyday communication in the workplace and in many homes also. Currently my ten year old daughter spends about one or two hours every day talking with her new friends in internet relayed chatting places. She has learned to be quite a speedy typewriter already.
But however good way witten word is we cannot depend on it text only. Facial expressions count so much. There is also the problem of typing. For many of us it is slow and troublesome and expressing ones true feelings in a written message requires much learning. It seems that we do not need to be satisfied on text only.
The first communication lines intended for homes were Videotex-lines. They were usually 300 bits / second from the server and 75 bits / second from the user to the server. This was quite enough for text transfer. This was the case in early eighties. Today the speed is 64 to 128 thousand bits / second with ISDN connections. This speed is enough for a satisfactory picture quality.
And as I think about it - satisfactory for many uses, I just one week ago attended a remote learning occasion where a violin maestro teached one of the Sibelius Academy students over a videoconference. It worked and it works for many other purposes also. But the nature of video conferencing equipment seems to prefer continuity of sound. Picture quality is good but it is not continuous. It does not seem to be very suitable selection for sign language if I think about you. There could be many better alternatives where the picture might even be slurry but continuous - this is a place where the standards are clearly set without thinking about the needs of the deaf.
Internet is luckily open and it allows for many different communications methods. The quality of internet is not currently very good but we must remember that the speed of communications increases very fast. In early eighties we had 300 bits and now sometimes 128 thousand and we are currently experimenting with 2 million bits per second to the homes.
The PC:s are becoming more and more powerful. The fastest are now thousands of times faster than the first IBM PC was. And they will still be a thousand times faster within the next ten years. Todays PC can do video transfer without extra hardware. And very much of the software is free for distribution. Let us now see what the picture looks like with 128kilobit or ISDN transfer rate and a free software and this laptop.
Video telephony answering machine demonstration…..
She was not home and asked to leave a message. This kind of messaging could be natural in a few years and one could as well show a written sign there or use sign language if the receiver could understand it.
I have estimated that 50% of the finnish households will this kind or better picture telephones by the year 2005. The time is ripe now because new PC:s are fast enough and they need no extra hardware to use video services. And when the user wants to be seen … currently the price of cheapest suitable video cameras cost about 100 dollars. The actual cost of the lens is 2 dollars and the necessary CCD-circuit is another 2 dollars and rest is somebodys profit.
When someone like Compaq decides that the camera should be standard equipment in new homecomputers it would increase the manufacturing cost by 20 dollars only. If this happens by the year 2000 as I have reasons to expect - it would lead to the 50% figure by the year 2005. In addition you could count those videotelephones included in mobile telephones, television set top boxes and new fancy telephone sets.
The era of video telephony is finally arriving but we must still consider the quality of the picture from your perspective. If we increase bandwidth the quality naturally gets better. We can also use different coding systems to leave sound off and give video more bandwidth or to make it more fluent like some movie distribution standards are.
There is also the possibility to animate the hand movements with special gloves and special animation software. The necessary bandwidth would be minimal and the quality of picture would be very good and quite accurate. I am sorry that I have no demonstration of this technology but I will show You now a corresponding technology. A virtual reality youth club. Each of the people are at their homes and they have special sensors attached to their body to measure their movements. The youth club server collects the signals and distributes them to everyone. Every users home computer then creates the combined picture from the information. This requires very little bandwidth and sign language could be delivered in similar way combined with video from the face.
Virtual youth club (sensor-animation movement) demo….
Next I would like to point out a very important message. New PC:s start to be powerful enough to receive TV-quality bitstreams with free sotware. If we increase the quality of the lines we do not need to do all these tricks with software or animation. The demonstration You will see next uses 1.1. megabit per socond bandwidth. This can be distributed over a usual telephone copper line for the length of five kilometers. It requires us to put up new digital modems in each user household and corresponding equipment in each telephone switch for each user. Then we need to connect the telephone switches with very fast backbone.
You can make a calculation - if 500.000 people would simultaneously use 2 megabit connections the backbone would need one million megabits of capacity.
The capacity requirement is enourmous but it will happen and we have started to build it. But let us now see the quality of picture in this future multimedia or broad band network using the old copper telephone lines and new digital subscriber line -equipment. I am still using only this laptop and a free software and I already have this system working in my home through the usual telephone lines and to and from my home computer.
Nature demonstration with 1.1Mbit MPEG
In the future we will find this as common as mobile telephones are today and within ten years we will find this even in many mobile telephones. But this happens only if the operators make the required investments and if they decide to do it this way. There are many operators who intend to build this DSL-quality so that it is asymmetrical. These people think that we only need to see good quality coming from the network to us but we do not need to send it to others. There are many who think that we would have nothing important to say to others that would require so good quality that the television programs require.
Now we come to the essence of the Helsinki Arena 2000 project. We believe in media democracy. We believe that the networks should be built to support symmetry, so that everybody could send their own videostreams with good quality to any others. We believe also that we can build the networks so that anyone can send from their home or hobby video streams so that the network itself would easily multiply the streams to all others that want to view it. This would mean that everyone would have their own television transmitters or tv-stations instead of only having to receive.
Today You need to buy a digital video camera worth 2 thousand dollars and another two thousand dollars worth of compression hardware and then You are all set to have Your own TV-station If only the operator will let You.
You can show other people Your kids birthday. You can show how to change the carbonator in Your car. You can set the camera in front of Your aqarium - and certainly it will be better than most other programs You get from television.
Incidentally - If You get more than ten people watching - we might pay You because You got us so many customers. Usually we have only one person listening while the other talks.
In 2005 we as we expect those 50% of homes in Helsinki will have video telephony and they all are potential tv-stations. We expect to have several thousand stations transmitting quality video regularly. These will be churches, theatre clubs, freelance musicians, teachers, dog shows or karaoke bars. Any special group can have their own tv-stations.
This does not come by itself. We have to be determined to invest millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to our networks - like we have done to the old networks. As I mentioned already -we also have to design and provide this so that each signal can be multicast to as many others as want to watch. This is possible if the networks are designed carefully to allow media democracy. Top down comes byt itself - this requires effort and determination and it seems to require travelling abroad to convince others to join the crusade. But this is possible and we will do this in Helsinki.
We have decided to change our basic telephone network into a multipurpose broadband network. We are turning our basic network into a great switched ethernet or virtual ethernet using DSL, switched ATM and other new technologies.
This network transfers bits with internet protocols. You can use it for video but You can also connect other things to it.
I am just building a new house. I got my light bulbs and even water taps connected to house automation network. This is connected to Windows NT server which in its turn is connected to internet. Now I can open my Nokia mobile communicator and check wether I left lights on or water running. Actually I did not plan my house to be operated by a mobile phone - it just happened as a by product and now I have a security problem. I need a firewall to stop hackers turning my lights on and off. But my frizge I really want to connect to internet.It will have a small web camera inside and then when shopping I can look with my 9000 Communicator if I need more milk home or not.
We have a large consortium with the City and various others including IBM, all local universities, Nokia, largest bank, newspaper, cable tv-company to build service infrastructure. But we expect that tens of thousands of people will start doing their part to supply content and communication services to this second level of internet.
We do not believe that distance has lost its meaning. You can send text and animation cheaply over long distances. But I have a two megabit connection to my home and within three years it will be possible for everybody in Helsinki. This connection would cost me hundreds of times more per minute over atlantic than just inside Helsinki. Highest quality and lowest price can only be achieved locally.
We believe that physical communities will have increasinly important meaning in the networks of tomorrow. We are creating a face - an user interface to our network that supports this. What You will now see is our first trial. It runs smoothly in fastest home computers of today. You can navigate where-ever You like. You can watch the buses go in real time. You can go to Your friend door and push the doorbell and we connect a telephone or videophone call for You or open her homepage or You can look at her fridge if she lets You. Possibilities of this kind of living maps are endless.
Demonstration of 3D City…
This was our living map where anyone can wonder around without getting their feet wet. And please do not compare this with travelling. Compare this with reading a telephone catalog or a regular map. Things change.
Internet has standards for this. PC:s are ready for this and in Finland there is a company that has developed tools for this for the past eight years. Modelling all of Helsinki including suburbs so that all 500.000 citizens feel that they belong to this network costs about 2 million dollars which is only 20 % of what it costs to print our telephone catalog every year.
We do expect that tecnology develops so fast that we can provide all these communications capabilities for the average cost of a local busfare per day. For us this would still mean very big increase in turnover and profits. And for our society as whole I expect this will mean even more.
You can create fear by saying that we would like to replace physical nearness with machines. On the other hand this could have been said also about paper and pen and the postal service or the telephone. Actually it seems that people behave very wisely on the largest part. The time used on internet is away from the time used to watch television. We should in fact compare video telephony with the soap operas in television. Which is better?
We should perhaps compare these possibilities with sitting alone in the car when travelling between various offices and then ending up facing the officials behind glass counters - they could as well have been behind the computer screen glass and without the bother of travelling.
Internet with its possibilities is just a tool for us to use for communication.
In the future these tools may bring us many new possibilities. I have used automatic language translators in internet. One can be found in Altavista-web site and it is free. I read an article written in portugese about our project and even though it sounded funny I could understand almost everything it said.
I have also used and seen demonstrations on automatic speech recognition. Speech synthesisors I used quite a lot on my work twenty years ago. All these technologies may make your life easier in some future date. Automatic translation can be developed for sign languages to convert it to text or speech in any other language. And one could use speech recognition to convert speech to text or speech to sing language. These machine translations are certainly no match for human translation but expert translators are not available for everyone - technology is getting cheaper and faster. It will help very many people in the future.
As we think about the possibilities of technological tools to help us we must also give some thought to the different ways where information society may lead us. I attended a UNESCO conference on Information society - Copyright and communications just one month ago. It was quite an experience for me - It was the first time I was a representing my own country formally in an international meeting. I was very astonished to notice that Scandinavia seems to differ both in opennes and in the concept of democracy from southern Europe.
UNESCO people were very concerned about the commercial content creators interests and most of the conference concentrated on their rights and the possibilities of commercial companies to get money from content. Very little emphasis would have been put on the possibilities of the usual citizens. It was mentioned that citizens must be guaranteed equal access to the information but without the firm commitment of nordic countries there would have been no talk about providing possibilities for the citizens to send information to the networks.
There are strong trends that the network and content providers would like to build these networks in the interests of the mass media. Not in the interests of community communications where the citizens create the content for each other. Currently there is a strong confrontation between the media companies and the commercial content creators against those who would like everyone to have equal access to send to the net. This fight takes place on many fronts. There are attempts to create new “freedom of speech”- legistlations and new media laws which would harness internet with the responsibilities of current media even though it should very often be compared with physical meetings.
There is also a technological debate which is currenly favourable to mass media. Operators are tended towards building asymmetrical networks wich means that we cannot use high bandwidths to view each other - we can only use high bandwidths to view the commercial contents. I do my best to fight these and I am glad that I work for an organization that believes in communications and believes that everybody has something important to express to others. We are not just consumers or objects - each of us should have possibility to take part in creating the new environments.
Thank you very much for your attention and many thanks to the translators.