By Lewis Shepherd, Director and General Manager of the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
Mobile, mobile, mobile. It’s the future of technology. Smartphones and tablets have already changed our lives, enabling us to communicate, collaborate, and access applications from devices that fit in our pockets. The next decade is poised to bring even more sophisticated computing experiences on-the-go, but what about when we’re not on-the-go?
If you think about it, devices can be limiting as well as empowering. We don’t always want to experience reality through a tiny screen held up in front of our face. It’s certainly not the ideal way to experience entertainment, and the future of “room-based” or “area-based” computing has the potential to be just as exciting as mobility. Kinect got a lot of attention at CES earlier this month, mostly as an innovation that will change the face of gaming, but it has incredible implications for entertainment, business and government as well.
The beauty of Kinect is that it communicates like humans communicate. The most popular feature is the motion tracking (it understands gestures), but its speech recognition is just as impressive. It also visually recognizes people. When I walk into my living room, Kinect knows it’s me due to my body type and facial features. After I’m recognized, it automatically pulls up my stored preferences – like my favorite Web sites, my Twitter feed, and entertainment options. The next step will be bringing online collaboration software into the mix – managing documents, checking calendars, paying bills and chatting in real-time using the biggest screen in your home or office. Imagine doing these things without a laptop, without a keyboard!
So what does this mean for government? The most obvious impact is in training and simulation. Our DoD customers are very intrigued by Kinect’s ability to place personnel in a completely distinct, immersive 3-D environment and track decision-making through movement. It holds the same power in healthcare. As my colleague Chris Niehaus pointed out in a related blog post, the medical community sees incredible value in areas like physical therapy, telemedicine, medical training and neurocognitive practices. Imagine practicing surgery on virtual human patients, measuring physical therapy progress in real-time, or showing your doctor where something hurts from a remote location.
Soldiers trying out Kinect at the 2011 Military Health System (MHS) Conference this week in Washington, D.C.
Beyond the training and simulation possibilities of “area-based” computing, there is the potential to transform citizen services. Take the DMV for example. Right now, in order to renew our license or get new plates, we have to go to a physical DMV location to confirm our identities, update paperwork or take an eye exam. With Kinect, this could all be done from your living room, or from your office during your lunch break. The ability to authenticate identities in a virtual space using body and speech recognition software could also radically change the way we secure our government IT systems. Rather than having to remember a 12-digit password to access protected data, the proper agency personnel would be automatically recognized and granted access based on physical features.
Area-based technology is really only limited by our imagination, so if you have other ideas on how Kinect can be used to support government, leave them below!