EE Times writes about “a world in which computers and networks disappear into the background of smart rooms and buildings”, concluding that much work still needs to be done.
The concept initially sparked work in mobile tablets and software agents. Today’s efforts have morphed to pursue intelligent buildings packed with wireless sensor networks and displays, where information follows users wherever they go. “As computers proliferate, the kinds of relationships we have with them will be less based on input and output and more on sense and response,” said Joe McCarthy of Intel.
Researchers said that “ubicomp,” as the discipline is known, is not ready to emerge from the lab just yet. “There’s still a lot of work in how to build the distributed computing systems needed for ubiquitous computing,” said Steven Shafer of Microsoft. “There are a lot of systems research issues in creating reconfigurable, stable and ubiquitous environments. And underlying sensor research [is still] needed.”
