Mobile Ubiquitous Computing (Is What I Want)

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Funny, this. In yesterday’s post I was complaining about what a hassle it is to move between computers and not have continuous access to all your data, settings and online identities.

Today, I came across this quote by Bill Gates about the successor to Vista, now code-named Vienna or 7. Gates, asked to explain what a ‘more user-centric OS’ would be like, said the following:

That means that right now, when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things.

That does sound a lot what I want, but it’s not enough; I don’t just want Microsoft to offer me my home page when I log on somewhere. I can do that myself already. So, I’ve been looking into this a bit further and I’ve come up with a few interesting search terms, which have been yielding similarly interesting results. However, I should warn you: if this does not sound utterly fascinating to you already, then don’t read on; there’s a lot more of this to come.

Making the user know what they want

First off, there is user-centric identity management and one article in particular, which deals with online communities and identity, called Community Support and Identity Management (PDF). Its abstract begins:

With the current approach, users have to provide and update information about their identity and interests for each community independently. That results in cold-start problems with new community support applications and in inconvenience for the user.

Precisely my point yesterday, about not being able to share and store my experiences. The goal of user-centricity is to enable the technology to help itself, aimed at what the user wants. This however has to happen automatically, because, it seems, most users would not even know what info is relevant.

Get that user out of here

Since we don’t know what we need ourselves, another recurring theme is that of context providers or, more generally, context-aware computing. This led me to an article about a project called the CyberDesk. That stated:

Context includes, but is not limited to, information the user is attending to, emotional state, focus of attention, location and orientation, date and time of day, objects and people in the user’s environment.

See? Focus of attention, location and (lack of) orientation. That’s the pub bit I talked about previously. Pity the project seems dead in the water, with the most recent articles so far dating back to 2001 or thereabouts. If anyone knows what happened to it, do comment. I do know that it’s us who are slowing things down; the limitations aren’t due to the machines, of course, but to our own lack of attention. We have to get out of the ‘information overload’ and ‘end the continual interruptions’. In other words: let the machines do their job.

Anywhere, anytime, for everybody

Summed up, what we need is MUbiComp, or as explained on (Russian site!) CyberPunk, Mobile Ubiquitous (Wearable) Computing:

• Devices that are easily transportable and simple to interact with.
• Devices that are immersed in a real, human-based environment.
• Devices that are mobile and wireless, and may reside on or in a person.

Here is an interesting quote from the about section of the Context-Aware Computing Group at MIT (also rather slow as a project, with only two posts in 2006, none this year):

The goal is to demonstrate how ‘context’ such as who we are, what we are doing, where we are doing it, why we might be doing it, and when it should be done, can simplify our ability to control systems.

I think that nicely sums up what I wanted to say yesterday. However, two things strike me in all of this: that the ideas of cyborg studies and chip implants aren’t far removed, and secondly, that it’s not a new idea at all. Apparently, PARC researchers in the 1980s were already onto this, envisaging:

[...] large, wall-sized, flat-panel computer displays from large-area amorphous silicon sheets [that might] function as input devices for electronic pens and also for the scanning of images (by placing documents directly against the displays).

Still, the more I delve into this, the more I keep running into the same, late 1990s material. Even the bizarre Russsian site, which claims to have been updated ‘only’ two years ago, links to an article about ‘hot items in ubicomp’… dated 1998! I did find a course at the University of Helsinki, though. On this page, under course information, a large number of contemporary links can be found, together with some videos even from the Group Lab of the Human Computer Interaction Department at the University of Calgary. It seems, then, that education is where the action is. Perhaps I should pop over there and see what’s going on. To be continued, no doubt.