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The WDN Symbian DevZone... Anthropics Sets Standards in Smart Messaging on Symbian OS
by Richard Bloor, May 28, 2002
Anthropics are a UK start up with ambitious plans to create a whole new standard in
smart messaging. This week we look at their technology and why they chose to
implement it on the Symbian OS first.
Anthropics (www.anthropics.com) was spun out from the UK National Film and Television Studios
research laboratory, Createc. Based at the famous Ealing Studios, their technology
uses the power of computer animation to take a static picture of a face, and it can be
any face that includes recognizable mouth, eyes and nose, and make it move in sync
with an audio track. This technology is being applied to a variety of applications
ranging from computer based training through to the recently announced wireless
messaging.
The messaging technology has a compelling value proposition to mobile operators
who face the twin problems of saturation in the current SMS market and the delays
in rollout of 2.5G and 3G networks which hampers their ability to leverage new
media opportunities. Anthropics Synthetic Video allows operators to overcome
these delays and deliver video like messaging with their current infrastructure.
Michael Burling, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing comments that
"Anthropics is uniquely positioned to deliver low-bandwidth video messaging over
GSM, GPRS or 3G networks as both pre-authored content, such as pre-authored clips
of horoscopes, news and sports, as well as peer-to-peer messaging. Furthermore,
with the low processing power required to run our FaceWave player this enables
mobile device manufacturers to provide enticing video messages on their lower-end
devices."
A conventional 30 second video message (delivered in MPEG4) can take a staggering
2530 seconds (40 minutes) to be delivered on a GSM network, while it is much better
on 3G, it still takes 90 seconds. The equivalent message delivered using FaceWave
technology takes 30 seconds in all these environments.
This performance is achieved using a classic client-server approach where:
the sender creates an SMS or voice message on their handset and sends it with
details of the image to be used to the FaceWave server (images are pre loaded to
the server by the user or sent with the message)
the server converts the text to voice, creates the face animation and packages the
message
the message is sent to the receiver and played by the FaceWave player on their
device.
One of the challenges facing Anthropics is that they need to have their player
deployed on a wide range of handsets, as, obviously, the sender and receiver need to
have the player for the system to function. With this in mind Anthropics have
adopted a business model that relies on generating revenue either directly from the
message traffic or sales of the message server rather than the Player.
The player needs to become virtually ubiquitous, to drive this Anthropics are
making the player available for free, with versions for most mobile platforms and
plan to cover all handsets over the next few years. Initially a number of Operators
and Handset Manufacturers want ‘downloadable’ players, which the consumer can
install after they have purchased their phone. While this will work for higher end
phones using Microsoft Pocket PC or the Symbian OS, there will still be instances
where Anthropics need code on the Handsets, and in these instances the player will
need to be pre-installed. One enabler to achieve this is again to provide a free player
to the manufacturers.
The player was originally written in C++ and then Java for the PC world. The
mobile version has been rewritten in C with an implementation also being
developed to run in the J2ME environment. The J2ME variant has been challenging,
as there is no native support for sound or displaying video. As a result the J2ME
Player will need to include some code on the phone.
The choice of development environment was very much driven by the current
standards push from handset manufactures, driven by the open mobile architecture
initiative, which Michael Burling noted “means that it must be a Symbian or J2ME
player”. The reason for the Symbian player being developed first, in addition to the
need for extra resident code for the J2ME version, was the Operator driven
requirement for a downloadable player, a requirement which could be achieved
with the Symbian OS. Gary Sleet, Vice President, Product Development commented
that "the Symbian environment, while not very easy to develop for, is very powerful
and allows low-level, efficient access to device capabilities."
The architecture of FaceWave also eliminates the need to rely on specific hardware
configurations, such as a DSP. To run it needs only a way of playing uncompressed
audio and displaying frames of video. However, depending on the processing
power of a particular device, the player can take advantage of pre-existing libraries
that are available, for example many devices have a DSP audio decoder which can be
utilized by the FaceWave player.
Obviously to achieve the penetration desired to make FaceWave a viable messaging
service Anthropics are also developing players for Microsoft’s Smartphone 2002 as
well as a number of proprietary systems.
There are a number of phones that we are working on with Manufacturers for
the end of 2002 and they include:
Nokia - 9200 Series (available now), 7650
Sony/Ericsson - P800
Sendo - Z100
The player may also have another role on mobile devices as a mobile assistance that
can be used to deliver on device help or tutoring.
I'll leave (almost) the last word to Michael Burling who is confident “that we have
the most attractive video messaging product for mobile device manufacturers."
You can view a demonstration of the Anthropics technology here
(http://www.text2video.com/anthropics_web/t2vmobile.asp) and more
information on their solution is available from their Web site (www.anthropics.com).
About the "WDN Symbian Guy" Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier
work was largely in design and development of commercial and
manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on
development and test management of government systems.
Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System
Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.
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