Nokia, the world’s leading mobile handset maker, has been giving some mixed signals about its research direction of late, an area where it spent more than $8bn in 2007.
Bob Iannucci, its first non-Finn chief technology officer, stepped down at the end of September after only nine months in the job. He had been based in Palo Alto and was head of the Nokia Research Center there, from when it first opened two years ago.
Nokia has not given the reasons behind his abrupt departure and has not announced any replacement.
However, it did announce at The Way We Live Next press day in Palo Alto on Thursday that it was continuing to extend its research labs network. Hollywood will be added as a location, joining Palo Alto and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US, two centres in Finland and others in the UK, China and Switzerland.
Henry Tirri, the current head of Nokia Research, said the new Los Angeles centre would focus on entertainment, one of three key areas of research he highlighted – the others being traffic and personal health. He said Nokia’s strategy and commitment had not altered.
“The world hasn’t changed, the talents are global, we go where the top innovation happens,” he said.
Rebecca Allen was introduced as head of the Hollywood lab. She was the founding chair and professor of UCLA’s department of design and media arts, a senior research scientist at MIT Media Lab Europe and the design manager for One Laptop Per Child’s XO notebook.
In the next year, she hopes to come up with some prototypes for how “Mobile Augmented Reality” can be developed for entertainment applications. The idea is that handsets in the future will have so many sensors, users will be able to see the world around them differently through their viewfinders and use their bodies and gestures more to give the device commands.
In entertainment, this could mean some kind of alternate reality gaming and the new head also gave examples of enabling body movements, such as a hand on the heart being a command for making contact with a friend, while one on the back pocket would initiate a financial transaction.
The Palo Alto centre has been focusing on traffic and the power of aggregating data from sensors in phones. Its Mobile Millennium project, launched last week, is enrolling up to 10,000 motorists in a traffic monitoring system that uses GPS chips in phones to help build up a comprehensive picture of motoring conditions in the Bay Area.
