"Thin" devices presenting Windows Media Center scenarios

May 22, 2007 16:09 GMT  ·  By

The Pika technology was introduced by none other than Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates during his speech at Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2007 in Las Vegas on May 15. Pika is a concept intimately connected with both Windows Media Center and the Microsoft Rally technologies. Breaking down Gates' statement, Pika is designed to enable remote media experience and user interface. Additionally, Microsoft intends to make Pika a universal component of consumer electronics, with Rally serving as the underlying connectivity technology.

"Rally is going to lead to a lot of new innovations. One of the things I think will be very important is this ability to remote media experience and user interface, the underlying technology we call "Pika" that we've got there in the Xbox 360. We're going to make sure that that's easy to put into all sorts of consumer electronics devices, so when you go out and get an HDTV set, that will be built-in. We'll enable PCs themselves to be"Pika" display terminals so you can do the extensions that way. And that remoting capability people will just come to see that as something they ought to have for every screen in their house, both getting at the media and getting at the full power of the PC that they're connecting up to," Bill Gates explained.

Dennis Morgan, a program manager on the MCX team revealed that, indeed, Pika will deliver the same functionality to remote Media Center onto an Xbox 360 and additional devices, and gave TV sets as an example. In the end, Windows Media Center will no longer be tied down to Windows Vista or any operating system for that matter. In this context, users should look forward to Windows Fiji, the upcoming, out-of-band version of Windows Media Center scheduled for 2007/2008.

"Pika specifically is a set of technologies that enable relatively "thin" devices to present Windows Media Center scenarios with fidelity and richness that is usually restricted to a PC or Xbox360. The level of computation and graphics performance on the latest HDTVs, HD-DVD players and Digital Media Receivers, while impressive, still trails PCs and game consoles by a wide margin. The Pika architecture is tuned to compensate for this performance mismatch and distributes the computational load in ways that are not necessary or appropriate for PC to PC or PC to Xbox360 distribution scenarios," Morgan said.