Whatever happened to Xerox PARC? They did some cool stuff in their days, did Xerox drop the whole computing idea and go into building office machines like printers and copiers?
we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.
Peripheral computing, using a machine with the ability to aid us somehow, but without knowingly sitting in front of your keyboard and moving into the computers world of applications and keys.
The “virtuality” of computer-readable data—all the different ways in which it can be altered, processed and analyzed—is brought into the physical world.
We have found two issues of crucial importance: location and scale. Little is more basic to human perception than physical juxtaposition, and so ubiquitous computers must know where they are.
Pads differ from conventional portable computers in one crucial way. Whereas portable computers go everywhere with their owners, the pad that must be carried from place to place is a failure. Pads are intended to be “scrap computers” (analogous to scrap paper) that can be grabbed and used anywhere; they have no individualized identity or importance.
I’ve started keeping most of my documents on the internet – spread between flickr, here, and a wiki I use for schoolwork and brainstorming, everything I can think of thats important to me but for large files (videos and mp3’s on my iPod/external HD) and my address book is at my fingertips anywhere there is a computer handy. Sweet.
So tabs, pads, and boards; individual computing devices. On the front end of interaction, none of my virtual things are stored anywhere, yet the back side everything is always centralized somewhere.
By pushing computers into the background, embodied virtuality will make individuals more aware of the people on the other ends of their computer links. This development carries the potential to reverse the unhealthy centripetal forces that conventional personal computers have introduced into life and the workplace. Even today, people holed up in windowless offices before glowing computer screens may not see their fellows for the better part of each day. And in virtual reality, the outside world and all its inhabitant effectively ceases to exist. Ubiquitous computers, in contrast, reside in the human world and pose no barrier to personal interactions. If anything, the transparent connections that they offer between different locations and times may tend to bring communities closer together.
When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial: “Who made that dress? Are there any more in the store? What was the name of the designer of that suit I liked last week?” The computing environment knows the suit you looked at for a long time last week because it knows both of your locations, and, it can retroactively find the designer’s name even if it did not interest you at the time.
Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.
Fun stuff.
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