AEG Olympia AG was showing off some of the research and development work currently taking place under its aegis: at the Daimler-Benz Research Institute AEG is working with Daimler-Benz researchers to design a keyboardless workstation. The product on show (called InnoDesk) featured a screen and a tablet face with four different areas on it – the user could, via a stylus, operate one area as a normal cursor, while another graphics area enables the user pointer control to position the cursor anywhere on the screen. A third area can be trained to learn the handwriting of the user so that data can be entered in longhand and a fourth area can be trained to recognise hand-drawn symbols such as that a triangle is a symbol for the roof of a house. The project has been focussed on developing the technology behind advance line recognition and speech recognition. The applications on demonstration were running under an unmodified MS-Windows program and work with most MS-DOS graphics and word processing packages. One hypothetical use for such a workstation is that it could receive facsimile messages which the user would then be able to view, edit using the stylus, add more information to via a scanner and store. It has taken two years to get the technology to this stage and the developers are keen to get feedback from users as to the usefulness of keyboardless workstations, hence they will be found doing the exhibition circuit throughout the year. AEG Olympia has also been working on a videophone product for about five years and now has a working model, to be will be launched as a product into the German market at the end of this year. It runs over normal digital phone lines but requires two channels at a time and so costs twice as much to use. AEG’s codec conforms to the H261 standard and divides the picture into 8-bit blocks reducing it to a 312 by 256 resolution. The product will probably not be available in the UK for another year or so and will cost UKP15,000 or more to start with. However when Intel ships its Digital Video Interactive chip AEG believes that its videophone will drop down to meet mass market prices.
