Ubiquitous Computing

Don Adams holding shoe phone in publicity portrait for the television series 'Get Smart', circa 1965. (Photo by Warner Brothers/Getty Images)

 

I wanted to post one of my favorite visions about future cities, the ubiquitous computing coined in 1988 by Mark Weiser. Ubicom for me is one of the keys to future technologies and smart cities, it is a total revolution. As we follow the tech progress with the first computers like Zuse or Eniac, the World Wide Web in 1992, the arrival of the smartphones in 2000 and the Internet of things in 2015 we can see how the connectivity is spreading like a virus and surrounding all around us. For Mark Weiser this state where the technology and connectivity start losing the hardware and mimetizing in the environment becoming invisible is called ubiquitous computing.

 

Ubiquitous computing by Mark Weiser

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. Virtual reality is primarily a horse power problem; ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.

(Weiser, 1988, n/d)

 

We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.

(Weiser, 1994, n/d)

 

A few thousand years ago people of the Fertile Crescent invented the technology of capturing words on flat surfaces using abstract symbols: literacy. The technology of literacy when first invented, and for thousands of years afterwards, was expensive, tightly controlled, precious. Today it effortlessly, unobtrusively, surrounds us. Look around now: how many objects and surfaces do you see with words on them? Computers in the workplace can be as effortless, and ubiquitous, as that. Long-term the PC and workstation will wither because computing access will be everywhere: in the walls, on wrists, and in "scrap computers" (like scrap paper) lying about to be grabbed as needed. This is called "ubiquitous computing", or "ubicomp".

I first created the idea of ubiquitous computing from contemplation of the place of today's computer in actual activities of everyday life. In particular, anthropological studies of work life [Suchman 1985, Lave 1991] teach us that people primarily work in a world of shared situations and unexamined technological skills. However the computer today is isolated and isolating from the overall situation, and fails to get out of the way of the work. In other words, rather than being a tool through which we work, and so which disappears from our awareness, the computer too often remains the focus of attention. And this is true throughout the domain of personal computing as currently implemented and discussed for the future, whether one thinks of PC's, palmtops, or dynabooks. The characterization of the future computer as the "intimate computer" [Kay 1991], or "rather like a human assistant" [Tesler 1991] makes this inappropriate attention to the machine itself particularly apparent.

(Weiser, 1993, pp. 74-83)

REFERENCES AND OTHER LINKS:

Back home