Looking to ride on the wave of 3-D buzz flooding the consumer electronics market this year, Intel and Nokia have established a collaborative research lab in Oulu, Finland, to tackle the challenge of bringing 3-D to mobile devices. The Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center is up and running at the Center for Internet Excellence at the University of Oulu. More than 20 researchers plan to spend three years collaborating on the 3-D mobile concept.

The innovation center will initially focus on creating "new and compelling" Internet user experiences that "leverage the rapidly increasing processing and graphics power of mobile devices." Work is already under way on using 3-D graphics technology to create immersive mobile interfaces.

Mobile Breakthroughs

"3-D technology could change the way we use our mobile devices and make our experiences with them much more immersive," said Rich Green, senior vice president and CTO at Nokia. "Our new joint laboratory with Intel draws on the Oulu research community's 3-D interface expertise and, over time, will lay down some important foundations for future mobile experiences."

Intel and Nokia are betting on the potential for 3-D Internet to become the next major breakthrough in the mobile user experience. The Oulu region is home to a strong 3-D Internet development community, and technologies such as the open-source virtual reality platform realXtend have been created as a result of 3-D research in Oulu.

The Intel-Nokia research is part of their MeeGo project. The MeeGo concept was born about a year ago when Intel and Nokia decided to work together on mobile-computing initiatives. Essentially, MeeGo merges Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo operating environments for use in devices with both Intel Atom and ARM processors.

Exploring Near-Field 3-D

Nokia is betting heavily on the MeeGo operating system, which was developed for use in smartphones, tablet devices, and other touch-enabled environments. Intel and Nokia made the pre-alpha code available for developers to begin building on in July.

"Intel expects to put MeeGo out on lots of different form factors, and Nokia expects to launch at least one phone before the end of the year using that operating system," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. "We'll probably learn more about that at Nokia World, which is next month. The fact that the two of them are working together on 3-D is fairly logical. 3-D is a huge technological buzzword right now."

Greengart said near-field 3-D could be a major factor in the future of the technology because it doesn't demand TV sets, set-top boxes or 3-D glasses. He saw a demonstration of Nintendo's 3DS, the next-generation DS handheld gaming system, at E3 and called the effect "fairly impressive and genuinely enhanced game play."

Any effort to bring 3D to mobile devices would seemingly rely on the near-field approach, though Intel and Nokia didn't offer any details on how near-field 3D might be incorporated into the operating system or when a prototype could be available.

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