None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights.

The Personal Energy Cloud

The Personal Energy Cloud is Intel’s jargon for the halo of power consumption that follows you around – the wattage of the light bulbs you use, for example, and the intermittent drain of the television.

It’s a concept that neatly expresses what CEO Paul Otellini has described as Intel’s “long-standing obsession” with power consumption; but as yet it’s ill defined. Officially the aim is to help individuals “navigate the sea of energy data”; Eve Schooler from Intel Labs demonstrated how this might be accomplished using a sort of “Marauder’s Map” of electronic devices, which could be centrally managed, to help reduce power wastage and determine which individuals could access which resources when. For now though the energy cloud appears to be more a notion than a focused project.

The Personal Office Energy Monitor

Next to the airy energy cloud concept, the POEM system, demonstrated by Intel Labs’ Sylvain Sauty and Milan Milenkovic, seems almost prosaically practical. Designed primarily for large workplaces, it works by equipping every PC with a simple USB sensor unit which measures ambient temperature, light, pressure and humidity levels, as well as recording the power consumption of the computer itself.

By feeding this information back to a environmental management system, it becomes possible to minutely manage electrical services such as air conditioning and lighting, to ensure that each employee has what they need without any wastage. A friendly PC-based interface also allows employees to monitor their own power usage, and to send feedback via simple buttons with labels such as “I’m too cold”. Though Intel didn’t explicitly suggest it, one imagines that feedback like this could even permit a building to “learn” the perfect settings for each section of a building throughout a day.

Simple Energy Sensing

Simple Energy Sensing is a neat idea – a home energy monitor that can identify individual appliances from their characteristic electrical signatures – but there’s no escaping the fact that the demonstration system on display at Leixlip was the very same one I had already seen 16 months ago in California.

Intel’s James Song had the good grace to look slightly sheepish when I pointed this out, but directed me to research manager Charlie Sheridan, who assured me that the project is moving forward through domestic testing.

“We’re trialling the system in 15 employee homes in the US,” he told me, “and we’re preparing for our first aggressive push, into 200 homes in Texas. We’re also partnering with local utilities, in Ireland and the US.”

Did this mean Intel would be relying on electricity suppliers to monitor power consumption, after the manner of the now-defunct Google PowerMeter service?

“The involvement of the utility companies is purely to validate the technology,” Sheridan explained. “We’ll try to keep as much data within the consumer’s home as possible.”

Crowd & Sensor Sourced Services

Like the POEM system, Intel’s experiments in crowd-sourcing are unapologetically down-to-earth, but they could open up as yet unimagined possibilities. Simply put, the idea is to maintain a vast, anonymised database of sensor and GPS data, to “gather, process and share data securely” – and make it available to real-time applications.

One obvious use for the technology is for collating GPS data into real-time traffic reports, as already seen in services such as Vodafone Sat Nav. A prototype system, offering both laptop- and tablet-style interfaces, was on display (see photo).

But as Intel’s Ahmed Mohamed explained, by incorporating additional sensor data, more sophisticated services could be implemented within the same framework. For example, if large numbers of cars started sharing shock absorber data, it would be easy for councils to locate potholes in roads. The potential applications would be limited only by people’s willingness and ability to share data – and by the imagination of the developers.

The Dependable Cloud

Many businesses operate as hosted services, but there’s currently no simple framework for ensuring a particular set of legal obligations or policies is met by the host.

The Dependable Cloud – the brainchild of Intel’s Michael Nolan – is a framework which makes it easy for hosting customers to specify various policies, and for hosts to provide them. For example, for legal reasons a company might wish its virtual machines to run only on servers in certain geographical locations. Or, for reasons of security, it might want them to run only on hardware capable of enforcing trusted execution. The system can also help hosts manage SLAs in cases of reduced capacity, by automatically allocating resources according to service-level policies.

The Dependable Cloud concept hasn’t yet reached the likes of Amazon, but it’s already attracted support and funding from the EU’s SLA@SOI consortium.

DDR3 and Hyper Graphics

Intel engineers are always talking about optimising performance, so it’s no surprise to see some of their research projects focus on hardware metrics. The DDR3 analysis project, demonstrated by Matthias Grees, uses an interposer card that sits between the motherboard and DIMMs in a standard PC and measures bandwidth and power consumption in real time while applications are running. The data enables software engineers to keep track of how hard their programs hit memory, and helps hardware engineers develop better performing, more efficient memory controllers.

“Right now we use this internally,” commented Grees, “but if we wanted to we could productise this in about a year.”

The Hyper Graphics project has a similar aim, namely to monitor the use of L1, L2 and L3 cache in a running system. But rather than using hardware, this research, headed by Qiong Cai of Intel Labs Barcelona, runs applications and games inside a virtual machine that’s been modified to monitor cache requests. At present the project focuses specifically on the cache usage of integrated GPU, and has accordingly been dubbed “Hyper Graphics”.

The system is particularly useful for its ability to track “cache misses” – requests for data that isn’t in the local cache, which can cause significant performance degradation. With this information, developers can see exactly which parts of their software could be optimised to make better use of caching. And, since the system can simulate caches of arbitrary sizes, engineers can experiment with different cache arrangements to see precisely how larger or smaller caches would affect the performance of real applications.

Multi-Reality Interfaces

The name may sound like science-fiction, but the Multi-Reality Interface is another project with a solid real-world purpose. The idea is simple: the interface shows both a live video feed and a real-time digital representation of the same environment.

Though it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this would be useful, Jochen Grün from the Universität des Saarlandes explained: the manufacturing industry is moving to a modular factory model, where a single building can be rapidly retooled to make different items with different equipment. This means onsite personnel may be unfamiliar with the machinery they’re using, and unqualified to carry out repairs in the case of a problem.

A multi-reality view allows a remote expert to give immediate guidance. The live video view (which can optionally be presented in stereoscopic 3D) shows the situation on the ground, while the digital representation can show sensor data and other necessary details. With this information, one expert can provide instant instructions and advice to staff across multiple sites, keeping maintenance costs to a minimum. And because the system is built on web standards, the onsite staff can follow along on any portable device.

Lego Digital Box

Intel’s joint venture with Metaio Software and Lego was demonstrated at IDF last month, but for most Research Day attendees today was their first encounter with the Digital Box system – and it’s safe to say this playful take on augmented reality stole the show.

Though nominally a research project, the system’s already being rolled out to toy shops worldwide. You activate it by simply holding a box of Lego up to a camera. As soon as the software recognises the box, it superimposes a 3D representation of the assembled kit onto the top of it, so you can see what it looks like. If you want to see from the other side, simply rotate the box: the 3D image is anchored to the box and follows its motion in real time. And just to liven things up, the generated image is populated with animated Lego characters.

The system relies on nothing more than a simple webcam, a standard mobile Sandy Bridge platform and custom software. But the impression is something special – as you can see for yourselves in this demonstration video provided by Metaio:

However, during our research for that feature we endured almost an hour of hitting brick walls when attempting to download maps directly to a Nokia phone. And that’s a real shame, as Nokia has one of the more interesting pieces of satnav software, and it generously provides free maps for every country we can think of.

Showing a sense of humour we really didn’t appreciate, Nokia’s online instructions made you run around in circles. Click here, it said. No, here! No, not there, here! But we’re back where we were at the start, we cursed. Much anger ensued.

While Nokia has improved things in the past few weeks, to the extent that there is actually some sound advice on its “Find and download new maps page”, it’s still confusing to the Ovi Maps newcomer.

But fear not: here’s a step-by-step guide explaining exactly what to do and how to avoid the pitfalls Nokia doesn’t consider important enough to actually explain in any depth.

Step 1: Head to nokia.co.uk/maps

Above you’ll see the homepage. Now you should click on “Free country maps”, on the left-hand side under Free Downloads, which will take you to…

Step 2: Select your phone

… this page. Where, logically, you select your phone. We’ve got the E72 on loan right now, so we’re going to select that one from the dropdown menu…

Step 3: Install Ovi Maps on your phone

While there will be a version of Ovi Maps on your phone already, it probably isn’t the most up to date version. So, download Ovi Maps (just follow the automatic prompts), connect your phone in PC Suite mode, and then install Ovi Maps on the phone itself.

Step 4: The gotcha

All looks good. Except it isn’t. The crucial piece of advice is tucked away on the right-hand screen: to add maps to your phone you need to have Nokia Ovi Suite installed on your computer.

This isn’t to be confused with Nokia PC Suite, which is the suite you’re more likely to have installed. (A separate piece of map-loading software used to be provided to accompany Nokia PC Suite, but it it’s no longer available.)

If you do have Nokia PC Suite installed then uninstall it.

Step 5: Install Nokia Ovi Suite

Install Nokia Ovi Suite. Annoyingly, you may have to reboot your PC.

Step 6: Download the maps

With Ovi Suite installed, you can finally download the maps to your phone. Or, more precisely, to your desktop PC, at which point they’ll be transferred to your phone.

Open Ovi Maps on your computer, then click on View | Go to | Maps. Note that your phone needs to be connected to the PC at this point; make sure it’s in Nokia PC Suite mode rather than USB Mass Storage or anything else.

And from this point on, it really is easy. Ovi Suite handles the process of putting the files on your phone, which means that when you’re out and about you won’t need to suffer the pain (and potential expense) of downloading over 3G.

We all know about Google Maps and how brilliant it is. It’s gone from simple online mapping website, to an essential tool for mobile phones, complete with satellite photography, your friend’s location (Latitude) and, of course, the extremely groovy Street View.

But it’s not the only free mapping tool around, and not even the best, as I’ve been finding out over the past few months. The OpenStreetmap is a venture, started in 2004 by Steve Coast, similar to Wikipedia, only with maps.

His idea was that rather than rely on corporations with big budgets and teams of cartographers, or national institutions to generation mapping data, he would get the internet community to build up its own using GPS traces and donated satellite imagery.

I remember looking at it three years ago and being distinctly unimpressed at the level of detail. But, it’s improved beyond recognition, with maps of London, in particular, that are just as detailed, if not more so, than Google maps. And as time goes on, its accuracy and usefulness can only increase.

The really great thing about it though, is that the underlying map data is both free to use and manipulate. It comes under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 licence, and that approach is gradually beginning to bear fruit in the most wonderful of ways.

There are people working on all manner of projects, all across the world. There’s the OpenSeaMap project, aimed at mapping the shipping lanes and the like. Freemap is being developed for hikers in the UK. OpenRouteService.org is aimed at providing routing services, for cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

The most impressive, however, has to be OpenCycleMap.org, created by Andy Allan here in the UK. This boasts a cycle-specific view of the standard OpenStreetMap data, overlaying useful stuff such as where national and regional cycle routes are to be found, and where designated quiet routes run. It’s absolutely invaluable if, like me, you cycle a lot in town and don’t like sharing your ride with lorries and buses.

The open source nature of the OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap.org data means that it’s not only available online, though. It can also be repackaged and reused offline too.

The data’s already been re-engineered into Garmin-compatible format, so owners of eTrex and other recreational Garmin GPS units can download maps onto their devices for free. See here for links to the map files. There are even applications (mkgmap, for example) that let you generate your own Garmin-compatible maps, direct from the OpenStreetMap data.

And once you’ve got the maps on your device, there’s a whole host of other services to help you transfer routes and training data to overlay on the top of the maps. BikeRouteToaster uses OpenCycleMap to let you plan routes and then download those routes directly to your device, while GPSies focuses more on route-sharing. GPSies offers Google Maps as well as the OpenCycleMap for planning purposes.

I can’t help but be excited by all of this – and every week that goes by seems to throw up some another interesting development or avenue to explore. It can’t be long before some clever clogs somewhere produces a proper turn-by-turn in-car satnav application based on the free mapping data. Perhaps they already have…

But there was one thing that really entertained us without fail: the obligatory map-reading fiasco. Some of the finest arguments I’ve ever witnessed occurred in the front of our car, usually to a bizarrely ill-fitting soundtrack of Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years (thanks for that, Dad). So it’s with great sadness that I realise I’ll never repeat the great shows put on by my parents.

You see, over the last few days I’ve driven nearly 1,400 miles around the UK on a bit of a mountain climbing quest, and the journeys were, it has to be said, uneventful. And it’s all the fault of my car’s newest shiny gadget, its very own 1.21-Jigawatt flux capacitor, if you will. Also known as TomTom.

From London to Edinburgh; Edinburgh to Fort William; Fort William to the Peak District; from there to Snowdon, and finally back to London – TomTom was in control. Copious helpings of Red Bull and Pro Plus aside, the only genuine excitement I got was pranging the back of a Volvo in a service station at 2mph – and even then TomTom knew every slip road to guide us back out of the car park to the motorway.

And the worst part is that I absolutely loved it. I’m totally, utterly sold. Combine this with a Garmin GPS watch, which kept us updated on exactly how high up our three peaks we’d climbed, and I can safely say my limited map-reading skills will now be going the same way as my handwriting and my ability to remember phone numbers.

I know that’s not a good thing, I know gadgets are eroding old skills that we should all have, but when they make life so easy I really can’t muster up the effort to complain.

My only nagging doubt is that somewhere there’s a giant uberTomTom hooked up to a PS3, playing Gran Turismo and learning to actually drive the routes it knows so well. When that happens, when we all sit back and give up the driving to the real experts, I plan to retire in style.

Anyone know where I can buy a DeLorean?