Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It's clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.

The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search.

Lin Chao, a researcher at Intel, offered as an example the fact that users will be able to search videos of football games, to zoom into moments when their favorite players score and other events related to the respective game. According to Lin Chao, the technology is capable of recognizing and of categorizing a player's face and objects, like a goalpost or the ball, by using algorithms and the statistical processing technology developed by Intel. The same technology can help users find images and objects, without the need to type in keywords and tag photographs.

Unfortunately, the technology, which is part of Intel's "visual computing" project, cannot be used because of today's processing power, according to Chao. Because of the current processing limitations of today's PCs, processing a video to make it searchable can take hours. Chao couldn't predict when the technology would become available to consumers.

Intel is also working on a project that can track human activity to help caregivers, which is now at a point where Intel has implemented a pilot in Seattle, consisting of the deployment of monitors in 20 homes to track human activity.

Besides these projects, which are meant to change they way we interact with things around us, Intel is also working hard at its Larrabee platform, which is due for a 2010 release.