Fifty-five-year-old Kirti Trivedi, a professor at Powai’s Indian Institute of Technology, walks into his living room carrying a computer, a DVD player, and a stereo home entertainment system with a 300-inch monitor—all this in a small black box barely one cubic foot in volume, weighing roughly 12 kg.
It contains an entire line of computing and entertainment devices. It includes an operating system, a Pentium 4 processor and a modem. Using a projector with SVGA resolution inside the black box, he can turn any flat object into a screen that in theory can be as big as 300 inches. Your entire living room wall can become a monitor, for example. This Compact Media Centre (CMC), as he calls the black box, can beam a TV channel on the wall, or a computer screen that allows the user to sit several feet away and navigate through a wireless mouse or keyboard.
In the early ’80s, Prof Trivedi had entered a Japanese contest and found a way to replace the manual viewfinder on digital cameras with a monitor, now a routine feature in digital cameras. This was just one of scores of ideas from Trivedi’s sprawling creativity. Yet he’s generally had little success in selling his ideas to hardware makers. History is replete with marketing men rejecting great ideas, though. Trivedi’s take? "People who complicate technology are a bit dumb."
Despite the potential to storm urban homes, Trivedi is positioning the CMC as an educational tool that will radically change the way Indian students, especially the poor, are being taught. Priced at close to Rs 1.5 lakh, a single CMC can fill in for several conventional PCs in a huge classroom with every student sitting with just a wireless mouse, gazing at a giant screen.
