Intel raised the curtain on a number of new products — and dished out plenty of gimmicks, too (like these robot spiders and this personalized cancer treatments ) — during its 2015 Developer Forum. Here’s a rundown of everything that went down so far at the annual developer event.
1. Intel CEO: Future of computing rests on 3 big assumptions
Above: IDF 2015
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich opened his keynote speech at the big developer event with a focus on three big assumptions.
Computing in the future will be built on “sensification,” or the instrumenting of the world with computing sensors. It will also be “smart and connected,” or built on the Internet of Things. And computing will be an extension of you. It will, in other words, be used to express your wishes to your environment and the outside world.
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2. An Android phone with built-in RealSense camera
Above: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich showed off a new smartphone developed by Intel and Google with a cool feature: Intel’s RealSense and Google’s Tango are built into it.
In a demo, Krzanich showed how you can scan your home environment with the combination of Tango and RealSense, and then convert it into a digital form. The demo scanned an environment and showed it on the display of an animated smartphone. You could manipulate the image and do what you want with it. The demo fit in with Krzanich’s statement that computing senses will be ubiquitous in the future.
3. Here’s a smart Diet Coke-delivering robot
Above: Robot brings a soda to Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel
A smart servant robot developed by Savioke delivered a Diet Coke to Krzanich while he was speaking on stage.
The robot navigated the stage using an Intel RealSense camera and delivered the soda to Krzanich. He said it was an example of sensification of computing, and he said Intel will make a big push to integrate its environment and gesture-sensing camera into numerous robotic devices and the operating systems that support them.
4. RealSense is getting into gaming
Above: iRacing demo at IDF
Krzanich showed onstage how his company’s RealSense camera, which can sense and digitize the environment it sees, will be integrated into games.
He also showed a racing game, Skylake, created by iRacing and VRX. The game included a full-fledged racing simulator with a RealSense camera attached to it. The camera sees where the car driver’s face is looking during the simulation.
5. Securing the Internet of Things
Above: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich
Intel has created a protocol, dubbed Enhanced Privacy Identification, that will make Internet of Things communication and transactions more secure, starting at the chip level.
The Internet of Things is about making everyday objects smart and connected. But if those devices can be hacked, that could be a very big problem.
6. Here’s a BMX bike that can monitor stunts
Now you can get your next bike with built-in electronics that monitor how well you do biking tricks.
Krzanich showed a demo of a BMX bike with sensors attached to it that monitor the motion and position of the bike. It delivered real-time data about a stunt biker’s aerial moves.
It reported instant data on the height that he achieved, the speed of his moves, and other position data. The data was delivered wirelessly from Intel sensors that were built into the BMX bike.
7. Dancing robot spiders?
Above: Intel dancing robot spider
Dancing robot spiders may be coming your way.
Krzanich closed his keynote speech with a demo of gesture-controlled robots dancing on stage at the Intel Developer Forum.
We’re not sure what use these spiders will be. But Krzanich got a laugh when he joked, “I don’t think spiders are going to bring about the end of the world.” That was a reference to back in April when, in response to a Krzanich demo of the robot spiders, Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show quipped, “The end of the world is going to be fun.”
8. This security bracelet unlocks your computer as you approach
Above: Intel security bracelet
Your computer will recognize you in the future through your bracelet.
Intel is keeping pace with the growing development of wearables for the workplace. At the Intel Developer Forum today the company announced work on an “enterprise wearable” that can authenticate a user to a computer, and even wake it up when the user comes near.
The user has to authenticate the wearable device while wearing it, and reauthenticate if they take the bracelet off, Intel said. The good news is that it frees the user from having to enter passwords and wait for the computer to fire up.
9. Intel gets into television
Above: Intel Optane demo
Intel has gone Hollywood. The world’s biggest chip maker teamed up with United Artists today to create a contest for the inventor who can make the best wearable computing device.
Mark Burnett, chief executive of United Artists Media Group, announced the new TV show, dubbed America’s Greatest Makers, alongside the Intel CEO today during the keynote speech for the Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco.
10. Intel, Fossil Group to ship fashionable smartwatches this fall
Above: Fossil’s Greg McKelvey and Intel’s Brian Krzanich
Intel teamed up last year with watch maker Fossil Group to create wearable electronic devices such as smartwatches. Now the products are coming to the market soon.
For the past year, the two companies have collaborated on creating the new watches using Intel technology. The collaboration was announced in September 2014, and now the watches are just about ready. The devices are connected to the Internet, and they run Android Wear software.
11. Hands-on: Intel’s RealSense plugs your face into Twitch livestream
Above: RealSense can automatically put your head into a Twitch gameplay livestream.
Game livestreamers are going to love this.
With the Intel RealSense camera for the PC, it’s going to be really easily to automatically capture video of your face and insert it into a Twitch livestream of a game in real-time. As Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich demonstrated today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the Intel RealSense-powered cameras provide motion-sensing, gesture recognition, and 3D scanning.
12. Intel’s Optane memory can revolutionize gaming and kill loading screens
Above: Chris Roberts, third from left, of Roberts Space Industries.
Intel’s next memory chips just might make the open worlds of video games even larger, and the maker of one intergalactic game sees this as a “revolutionary” development — one that might even kill the dreaded loading screen.
Chris Roberts, the head of Roberts Space Industries and creator of the Star Citizen universe (an immense game where you fly starships, explore, and fight, among other activities), said onstage at the Intel Developer Forum that the Intel 3D XPoint memory technology in the upcoming Intel Optane memory chips will enable games with huge virtual landscapes and no loading screens. Normally, such huge worlds just aren’t possible, and loading screens take forever in high-end games.
13. Lets celebrate gaming, not fear it
Above: The Counter Logic Gaming crew.
The world’s biggest chip maker has a vested interest in helping gaming succeed, as the pastime pushes the envelope for computing technology and creates new demand for high-tech technology.
Nevertheless, Intel showed today that it is fully behind the gaming industry and support what it means for the computing industry and society. Gaming is something to be celebrated, not feared, according to Intel. Such talk is normal among game industry advocates, but it doesn’t always come out of the mouths of executives at mainstream companies like Intel.
14. ‘The Superman of data scientists’
Above: Owen Zhang of DataRobot is a top data scientist.
Owen Zhang is the Superman of data scientists. Intel anointed him with that title because he is ranked No. 1 on a website named Kaggle, a clearinghouse for data science problems.
On Kaggle, big companies post their data for independent data scientists to mine. The scientist who comes up with the best model from the data wins a prize. After 27 competitions, Zhang is ranked No. 1, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president of the data center group at Intel, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
15. Intel’s Collaborative Cancer Cloud enables personalized cancer treatments
Above: Eric Dishman, health executive at Intel, at IDF.
It took 23 years of treatment and an extended search for a cure to treat Eric Dishman’s cancer.
The Intel health executive eventually gained the help of cancer experts and genomics analysts who, over the course of three months, were able to figure out his problem and devise a specialized treatment that eventually worked.
The goal is to make treatment plans like Eric’s possible in just one day by 2020. Intel is going to open-source components of the cloud platform in 2016.
The Collaborative Cancer Cloud is a precision medicine analytics platform that allows institutions to securely share patient genomic, imaging, and clinical data for potentially lifesaving discoveries. It will enable large amounts of data from sites all around the world to be analyzed in a distributed way, while preserving the privacy and security of that patient data at each site.
16. Intel’s Skylake’s new generation will launch ‘in a couple of weeks’
Above: Intel’s Kirk Skaugen introduces the Skylake microarchitecture at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Sept. 9.
No, Intel did not officially announce its much-anticipated new generation of Skylake PC chips at its developers conference in San Francisco today.
But it did let go of some key details about the specs and power of the chips, as well as a pointer to an official launch “in a couple of weeks.” The information was given in a conference session, reports PCWorld.
And the new processors are powerful. Intel executives said that Skylake can power three 4K monitors simultaneously.
17. Intel has a message for the maker community
Above: Worry Birds on stage at IDF.
During a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel corporate strategy officer and resident anthropologist Genevieve Bell explored what it takes to be a “Maker” in the modern do-it-yourself technology phenomenon.
Bell linked the movement to build your own hardware, physical objects, and other sorts of creative inventions to the great inventors like Edison, Ford, Curie, and others. Intel is so excited about this hobbyist movement that it is targeting chips such as Edison and Curie at them for small gadgets that can power the Internet of Things, or everyday objects that are smart and connected.
“It’s never been a more exciting and accessible time to invent the future,” Bell said. “It’s about changing the world, in small ways and big ways.”
Updated August 20 with additional content from the event.
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