Who was the voice of HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey?
That question came up at a media dinner in a downtown Toronto restaurant one night this summer, and the way it got answered was an interesting lesson in the possibility of wireless content delivery.
A well-gadgeted Bell Canada
executive pulled out his wireless-equipped PDA and looked it up on the Internet without leaving the table.
I recognized the actor’s name and said I thought he’d acted at the Stratford Festival. That prompted another search.
Not earth-shaking stuff by any means. No lives were saved, or even changed. But it showed what can
be done.
A more meaningful example of wireless content at work might take place in a hospital, where a doctor is examining a patient and notices a puzzling symptom. A search on a wireless device could produce a quick list of problems that symptom might represent.
You don’t see much of this yet. If a doctor checks a PDA this way these days, more than likely the doc has a database of medical information actually stored on the thing, rather than a wireless connection. But a group at the University of Toronto has been studying the possibilities of wireless access in the medical field.
Mark Chignell, a mechanical and industrial engineering professor involved in this project, says research shows access to such information can change physicians’ decisions as much as 25 per cent of the time.
Assuming it changes the decisions for the better, I’d prefer my doctor had access to that information.
And yet what kind of wireless content is big today? Ring tones and wallpaper for cellphones and PDAs make up 70 per cent of the commercial market, according to Qpass Inc., a Seattle company that packages content for wireless carriers. Games are next in popularity. The customers are mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings.
Besides showing that these kids have way too much time on their hands (hey, it took me two months to get around to replacing my broken cellphone holster, never mind finding the time to download custom ring tones) this is a telling example of what trivial use we often make of interesting technology.
We’ve heard — though not so much recently, I’m happy to note —quite a bit about using wireless to bombard people with marketing messages. Is that really all this stuff is good for?
In terms of mass-market consumer applications, maybe it is. Maybe most of us don’t really want to check news, stock quotes, traffic reports or whatever from our PDAs or cellphones.
Maybe — apart from e-mail access, which seems to appeal to a fair number of people — wireless content doesn’t offer much to the average person but entertainment value.
Certainly it has real uses in some specialized areas — like the medical example, and like the police officers on the beat (in Hamilton, Ont., to name one real-world example) who can check police records and do paperwork without returning to the station, and the couriers who update a central database at the very instant they deliver their packages.
And of course, it’s nice to be able to find out who the voice of HAL was in the middle of dinner. It was Douglas Rain, by the way, and he was born in Winnipeg and has worked at both the Stratford and Shaw festivals.
