Wearable & Ubiquitous Computing
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Wearable & Ubiquitous Computing |
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Take all the computing power you need and use it in all aspects of your everyday life.
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Elsewhere on the Web
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• HIVE
• Wearable Computers for the Working Class
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A virtual visit to MIT Media Lab often offers more than pure information: it is hard to find another spot in the cyberspace that provides so much inspiration for both AI enthusiasts and professionals. Last week I was searching for information on wearable computing and artificial intelligence, and found an alternative approach that led to other interesting clues. Researchers gathered under the Things That Think (TTT) Consortium try to achieve a new breakthrough in user-centered computing. Rather than presuming that people must come to computers on terms dictated by the needs of the machines, TTT has sought to bring information technology to where people are, in the form that they need it in. This research led to new computing paradigms, from tangible interfaces and affective computers that recognize and respond to human emotion, to interspecies information technology for animals as well as people. All TTT projects share the common approach by implanting more or less powerful computers into everyday objects.
Mark Weiser coined the phrase "ubiquitous computing" back in the late 80's to describe environments with computers embedded in walls, tabletops, and other everyday objects. In his own words, ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. However, ubiquitous systems require complex, open-ended networked applications that are difficult to develop using standard tools and paradigms. To solve this problems, Nelson Minar and his colleagues at MIT created Hive, a software system implementing an ecology of distributed agents. It is basically a set of freely available Java libraries for creating applications enabling interaction of multiple agents across a network. "Hive: Distributed Agents for Networking Things" is an excellent introductory paper if you want to learn more about the ideas behind the whole project. "Wearable Computing Meets Ubiquitous Computing" is another great resource that describes the combination of wearable and ubiquitous computing paradigms.
Back to wearable computing, remembrance agent was one of the first and most successful applications in this domain. The fact that human memory does not operate in query-response pairs is often disregarded in information retrieval applications. The context of a remembered episode provides lots of cues for recall later, like physical location of an event, what was happening at the same time, who was there, and what happened immediately before and after. Remembrance agent is a wearable memory aid that continually reminds the wearer of potentially relevant information based on the wearer's current physical and virtual context. It continuously "watches over the shoulder" of the wearer of a wearable computer and displays short summaries of notes-files, old email, papers, and other text information that might be relevant to the user's current context. These summaries are listed in the bottom few lines of a heads-up display, so the wearer can read the information with a quick glance, and is able to quickly retrieve the whole text described in a summary line.
The COMRIS project, initiated by seven European research institutions, describes future user interfaces as digital parrots that sit on your shoulder and whisper relevant information in your ear. Although this old-style sailor approach can seem funny at the first glance, the vision of co-habited mixed-reality information spaces (software and human agents working together in real and virtual spaces) recently became quite popular. The Active Vision Lab at Oxford University develops algorithms, methods and hardware in order to allow us to have a Wearable Robot (WeRo) capable to deal with the wearer's world using artificial vision. Such robots have obvious uses in busy environments, but could also provide a bridge between purely functional wearable devices and the more socially sharable ubiquitous computing approach.
Wearable technology is now available off-the-shelf from the numerous sites around the Web. Prices are still pretty high, but if you want to try it for yourself or just see more background information and examples of industries and applications where wearables are being used successfully, we have a specialized subject areas reserved just for this topic. One of the market leaders in this area, Xybernaut Corporation, also provides a nicely organized site loaded with useful information. Another site worth mentioning here is eBiquity.org, a new portal dedicated to pervasive computing news and development.