The unifying component
If you've been following Windows CE over the past two years, you'll know that Microsoft is setting up a very specific approach towards making consumer devices and appliances able to talk to each other. In the past few weeks there has been another flurry of announcements relating to this, all contained under a new standard called Universal Plug n' Play. Although the name might remind you of the Plug n' Play feature of Windows 95, this is a radically different step.

Teaming up with 70 industry players, Microsoft says the goal of this new initiative is to make the PC into something new, something outside it's traditional space:

Microsoft foresees intelligent appliances, and PC peripherals all communicating and interacting with each other via a peer-to-peer network that requires little setup time and low to no overhead…[this] includes devices like electronic picture frames that are able to grab pictures from a PC or an Internet connection via a wall plug. These devices could ultimately be controlled via a universal remote. UPnP will be implemented for all Windows platforms along with PCs and devices running Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows CE.

Microsoft has demonstrated a touch screen device that controlled all electronic elements in the house including music, PC resources, and video. Although no detail was given on the device, I'm willing to bet it was a Windows CE device. In fact, despite Microsoft's mention of Windows 98 and Windows 2000, I wouldn't expect to see those OSs on anything other than PCs. Windows CE, which can be loaded on as little as 500k of RAM, could easily merge with your TV set, stereo, and camcorder. How would these devices all communicate with each other? Several options exist, the most likely being IrDA for the remote and something akin to a PROXIM (at http://www.proxim.com) wireless LAN.

There are those who will ask "Why bother? Do we need this"? That depends on how you define "need". But imagine the following simple scenario:

You browse the Web through your TV set, from a wireless keyboard, download the local database of programs running this week, and do a keyword search for your favorite shows. You select the shows you want to tape (by simply clicking boxes on the screen), and this information is transmitted to your VCR. Pretty cool, huh? All this is available now from the $200 WebTV Plus boxes, which will soon be Windows CE based.

But let's go on. Once recorded, you can sit down to watch the shows--and have your stereo system automatically change it's EQ settings based on a signal transmitted from the VCR denoting what sort of sound setting would work best (high tones for shows with a lot of dialog, or heavy bass tones for music videos). If you want to take the audio from the news program with you, simply download it to your CE device and listen on the road.

With the partnerships Microsoft is setting up, a complete scenario like this could be as little as two years away, and it gets even more exciting when you start to consider the ramifications of software-based MPEG2 (DVD) encoding from Ligos (at http://www.ligos.com), DVD-RAM drives, and the new MS AUDIO 4.0 format. As we move towards digital recording of audio and video we'll have even more options for using the content the way we want.