I lead our teams’ effort for the vision portion of Bill Gates last CES keynote. We highlighted the concept of “information anywhere” by creating a phone hardware/software prototype that showcased 2 scenarios: a digital guide for the real world; and accessing our digital history.

Scene 1- Real World Digital Guide

We envisioned how future digital lifestyles would use phones and other evolving devices to overlay the physical world with real-time information through software and services.

Using the Vegas strip as the backdrop and looking through the prototypes camera viewer, Bill observed contextual information and recommendations overlaid onto the world, and presented real-time.

We built a phone prototype (nicknamed “phonosaurus”) that used a combo of software from research and our team. Behind the scenes technologies included: GPS, camera’s and machine visioning ,info in the cloud, contacts, events, preferences, tracking behaviors, the weather, subscriptions, even sourcing 3D model information of the world from things like Photosynth and Virtual Earth.…

In January2008, phones had cameras and GPS which allowed you to know where you were, but not what you were looking at or how it’s related to your life.

Scene 2- Digital History

Here Bill and Robbie Bachdiscuss how all types of content will be accessible and easily shared through any device, anywhere we are. Like a unified library…content available in a single view no matter where it resides (PC, phone, cloud, etc…).

An individual’s history was viewed on a timeline. The timeline was accessed from the phone and then using a gesture, shared to the large screen in the room. The transition was seamless taking into account the new screens capabilities and restructuring the UI accordingly, rendering high res- images and 3D capabilities.

Here’s a low res version of the keynote.