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Our next Symbian expert comes straight from the very heart of France, Paris.  Rita El Khoury is one of the biggest Symbian  influencers on web and definitely a must follow on Twitter - @khouryrt . If you want to read the latest and greatest Nokia Symbian news around we recommend you read her pieces on  Symbian-Guru.com.  You can also find her personal blog at dotsisxblog.com.

Article wrote as part of Nimbuzz Nokia Symbian Week!

While browsing through the exposition floor at this year’s Nokia World which took place last week on the 2nd and 3rd of September in Stuttgart, I was drawn towards the new devices, software and solutions. It definitely was an eye-opening experience to talk to the people behind these different products and ask about some of the choices they made as well as their plans for the future. However, one demo from the Nokia Research Center struck me with its novelty, ambition, and absolute sci-fi factor. The team had some concept glasses which projected images and had an embedded tiny camera that detected your eye’s movement allowing you to browse through the pictures. A video to further explain the concept and show its true power can be found on this page under “Nokia Mixed Reality“.

Excited by the idea, I decided to try them on and see how they worked. After a short calibration process, I was moving through the images left and right, choosing one by focusing on it, zooming in by looking up and zooming out by looking down. It took a while to get used to the zoom process, but the browsing and selecting were incredibly intuitive for my eye’s movement and after 10 minutes with the glasses on, my mind was racing thinking about how cool the concept is, and how many different possibilities it allowed.

One area where “Mixed Reality” could excel is instant messaging, or contextual instant messaging to be more precise. A decade ago, technology took us away from reality, by imposing a new screen layer of virtual interaction and removing the barriers of line of sight. It’s true that services like Google Earth and games like World of Warcraft continue to blossom, but technology is moving back into reality and is trying to remove this screen limit, allow more contextual interaction with the world around us, while still providing manners to surpass the line of sight barrier.

With Mixed Reality, we would no longer have to cut ourselves from our physical surrounding in order to enjoy a chat or to exchange a file. We could be walking down the street or riding the public transportation and still reading the latest messages from our friends and replying to them. If a friend is physically close to us, his picture would show and start following his movements as he walks around in the real world. Just picture this. Haven’t you ever come across someone and discovered that some days ago, you spent like 4 hours a few blocks away from each other, maybe bored out of your mind, when you could have met for a cup of coffee? Virtually seeing your friend’s position in front of you when they are in your physical surroundings would solve that problem.

Also think of file sharing, especially media sharing with friends. We could fix something in front of us, which would trigger taking an image and instantly ask us if we want to send that image to someone. Or we start a video, and zoom in and out by focusing our eyes on different things around us, then we can pick a friend to share the media with.

Another way to share information with friends would be to leave them virtual notes in physical places. If I’m in a restaurant and I loved a certain platter, I could leave a note for all my friends to see if they ever come eating here, telling them what I loved about the dish and that I recommend it.

New friend discovery could also be an improved experience with pictures of online people popping in front of us as we walk through new grounds. Browsing the person’s profile for information would be as easy as looking at their picture, and adding them would only require a slight fixation of the eyes on the profile.

Mixed Reality based on eye movement and applied to instant messaging would also make our online/offline presence a much more intuitive experience. Right now, if you doze off while chatting on your computer or your phone, the system isn’t intelligent enough to recognize that, and you might be woken up by a new message notification from a friend. Following eye movement removes that problem, as when your eyelids start closing and don’t reopen for a while, the system could go into either offline or sleep mode. It would later wittily wake up and retrieve your offline messages when you open your eyes again, be it in 10 minutes or in 8 hours.

When you think of it, the future is more enticing than you could have figured. It might sound far fetched to imagine these different types of interaction right now, but we seem to move closer and faster to a Minority-Report kind of world, and we should start preparing ourselves now for the possibilities, the practical implications of new technologies, as well as the different issues that will rise when we start applying them. How do we protect our privacy when everyone can be aware of where we are, and how we’re moving? How do we log off, and would someone be able to hack into our virtual eyes and see what we’re seeing at any time? How do we raise the next generation of children in a world of Mixed Reality where nothing seems to be a valid boundary? Just a few questions we need to have answered even before the problem arises.

We can also see  the Nokia Mixed Reality video below: