Insights into future mobile multimedia applications

Abstract

In the last five years, mobile network applications have been characterized by the following multimedia applications: e-mail, web browsing, games, video-clip & music download, and multimedia mail. Those are early applications, in the emerging 3G mobile network era, ported from Internet. Thus, those mobile applications have been considered as a degraded version of Internet applications due to limitation of available bandwidth, latency, connection reliability and I/O device capability, where cellphones are also considered as miniature portable PCs. Borrowing many ideas from Internet, however, the mobile infrastructure has brought a highly-personalized popular communication culture that was never seen before. When looking forward the next five years, we may have a different story, where mobile network QoS is catching up and cell-phone is becoming an information hub in our daily life. What we are seeing with the mobile Internet evolution are (1) enhanced multimedia applications enabled by broadband and low-latency wireless networks, and (2) ubiquitous mobile applications enabled by cellphone peripherals together with connection ubiquity. The former network enhancement is just an extension but can be a great enabler of VGA-size 10MB video clips, music content download, and VoIP, and graphical SNS. The latter peripheral enhancement will be an extremely fertile incubation environment for new and innovative killer applications. That definitely differentiates mobile Internet from fixed-line Internet. As shown in the figure, a cellphone is now being equipped with many I/O devices. Captured environment with motion sensor, GPS, health care devices, microphones, and CCD cameras may interact with application servers via Internet. Thus content delivery, interaction with contents, and e-commerce are going to be associated with real environments that will bring us context-aware capability. Several examples are selected from the above areas for presentation.