CS710 Official Handouts

Lecture 1

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

-- Mark Weiser in his seminal paper on ubiquitous computing

“Computing that is omnipresent and is, or appears to be, everywhere all the time; may involve many different computing devices that are embedded in various devices or appliances and operate in the background.”

“The age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.”“The practice of making computers so common and accessible that users are not even aware of their physical presence. The ideal of ubiquitous computing could be defined as a high-speed network that covers any kind of geography and is easily installed and automatically maintained.”

Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp): is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and

An integration of microprocessors into everyday objects like furniture, clothing, white goods, and toys even paints.

The original term ubiquitous computing was coined by Mark Weiser in 1988 at Xerox PARC

The essence of Weiser’s vision is that mobile and embedded processors can communicate with each other and the surrounding infrastructure, seamlessly coordinating their operation to provide support for a wide variety of everyday work practices.

Evolution of Pervasive Computing

Weiser believed that in a ubicomp world, computation could be integrated with common objects that you might already be using for everyday work practices, rather than forcing computation to be a separate activity.

If the integration is done well, you may not even notice that any computers were involved in your work.

Weiser sometimes also referred to this as invisible computing

ParcTab, or Tab, an inch-scale computer that represented a pocket book or wallet

Tabs communicated wirelessly with a ceiling-mounted base station using 10 kbps diffuse infrared signaling

ParcPad, or Pad, a foot-scale device, serving the role of a pen-based notebook or e-book reader ParcPads employed a similar design approach using a low-bandwidth X-protocol across a radio link, communicating with a basestation through a proprietary short-range near-field radio

Liveboard provides the functionality of a whiteboard

Liveboards were designed around standard computer workstations, but with much larger penbased displays, and pen-based input In the mid-1990s, IBM began a research direction it called pervasive computing (IBM Mobile and

IBM, to its credit, was one of the first companies to investigate the business opportunity around pervasive systems, and created a business unit dedicated to the task. One of the first commercial deployments of a pervasive computing system was born from a collaboration between IBM Zurich and Swissair in 1999 (IBM Swissair), enabling passengers to check-in using Web-enabled (WAP) cell phones Once the passengers had accessed the service, the phone also served as a boarding pass, showing gate seat and flight departure information, and identifying the traveler as having valid fight credentials. Although this was one of the most publicized projects, IBM also applied these technologies to other service opportunities in banking and financial services, gaining early experience in this area.

Taking another approach to ubiquitous computing, wearable computing puts the emphasis on a portable computer that can be unobtrusively integrated with a person’s clothing, while still being comfortable for the wearer

An important related topic is augmented reality in which a computer is able to overlay information on top of what a user sees in order to improve ability to carry out a task. In an expanded view of ubiquitous computing with a suitably unobtrusive heads-up display embedded in our eyewear, augmented reality could become an indispensable tool of the future in much the same way we have come to rely on the cell phone today