Unique products at Net.Liferium

Net.Liferium, an exhibition for the networking technologies and its applications to daily life, was held in Yokohama between March 14 to 16, 2003. It showcased creative prototype products that are IPv6 compliant. Below is the report on the products that we found most interesting.


"Wireless Digital Listening Pilot" by Yokogawa Electric Corp.


Photo1 Digital Listening Pilot developed by Yokogawa Electric Corp.

This is a product that Yokogawa Electric has actually shipped to “Planet”, a company that provides listening stations to CD stores. The box shown in the Picture 1 is equipped with MP3 player, barcode reader, IPv4/IPv6 stack, and Wireless LAN function. CD store customers only need to scan the barcode of the CD they want to listen to, and the listening station will download corresponding MP3 music data via network and play it. MP3 files will be provided on-demand by a company that manages database of sample music, through servers at CD stores.

Planet has been providing listening station that uses general purpose PC or PDA as a platform, but it is adding this Yokogawa Electric product to their line-up as an easy-to-use low price model. Yokogawa Electric says that making Listening Pilot IPv6-enabled allows monitoring of individual stations, and makes it possible to analyze
consumer behaviors.


PlayStation2 Video Phone by Sony Broadband Solutions Corp.


Photo2 Videophone application developed by Sony Broadband Solutions Corp.

Last year, Sony Broadband Solutions made a prototype of software that uses PlayStation2 for online text chat and streamingvideo viewing. This year, they have come up with a videophone application shown in Photo2. This application lets you chose a person from a list of participants shown on the screen and communicate with them. It is a functionally simple application. However, the company explains that the SDK for PlayStation enables various image processing easily, such as embedding real-time movie into a sphere, and this will further expand the possibility for game and real-time communications.

Sony Broadband Solutions is a company that provides system integration, and is a separate company from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. which sells PlayStation2. This software is purely experimental and there is no possibility that this product will be on the market.


PDA with a link to RF-ID tag by Nokia Japan Co. and Nokia Research Center


Photo 3 PDA with RF-ID reader by Nokia

Nokia Japan exhibited an technical demonstration model of a name-card sized PDA that is supports Wireless LAN. The most interesting feature of this model is that it has a RF-ID reader, and it realizes an easy-to-use security system by configuring the network setting of the PDA using information obtained from the RF-ID tag the user is wearing.

Bracelet with a built-in RF-ID tag is shown in the lower right corner of the Photo 3, and this PDA assumes that the user is wearing this bracelet. Each RF-ID tag contains unique IPv6 address and a preshared key for IPsec. PDA reads the information and automatically reconfigure its own address to prepare for the new IPsec session.

In other words, this terminal can perform transparent user level access control, based on who the holder is at the time, and shows only the application and contents that the specific user is permitted to access. It has been generally pointed out that robust authentication is only achieved by combining something that only the right user has (for example, a digital certificate) with something that only the right user knows (for example, a password). In that sense, security level of this product is not so high, since it doesn’t use information that only the authorized user knows. For example, if PDA and the bracelet with RF-ID tag had been stolen together, there is no way to prevent unauthorized access other than to make the corresponding IPv6 address and the IPsec key invalid. However, from the user’s point of view, it is very handy to use. There is no need to type user name and password, and you can easily access all the application and contents you are authorized to use just by holding the PDA. It also provides advantages for administrators. It allows easy identification of individuals, and there is no need to worry about forgotten passwords. This PDA has been developed by the Nokia Research Center Japan, just for demonstration purposes and there is no plan to sell this product.