In the Beginning

When the Intel® Capabilities Forum first came online two years ago, we stated that our mission was to move the industry Beyond the Speedometer. Back in the fall of 2005, I stated that this web site was created to give voice to a platform evaluation approach that was based on quality of experience rather than raw speed. With the impending arrival of Intel® DHCAT 3.0, we believe that much of that original vision will be realized.

The Intel® Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (Intel® DHCAT) was born of the realization that the PC industry’s usual approach to benchmarking – faster is better – wouldn’t really work for the media-centric things people wanted to do with Media PCs. With video and audio media, quality of experience is a more telling metric than raw speed could ever hope to be. And so began our endeavor to put these ideas to work.

When we were getting started, the first thing we did was look beyond the PC industry to other industries that grapple with quality-of-experience measurement issues, like the telecommunications and broadcast industries. It was then we became aware of a technique called perceptual modeling, a field that blends audio/video technology, computer science, and cognitive psychology to understand, measure, and predict how real people rate quality of experience. The “secret sauce” of this field is that once researchers understand how people will rate video or audio playback experience, a model can be constructed to accurately predict how a group of people would rate that quality of experience…without them actually having to see/listen to the content. That’s a powerful evaluation tool: a jury test without the jury. Click here for more about the details about perceptual modeling.