The 'Pervasive Computing' Community

Roland Piquepaille writes "Most of us are using computers, but also PDAs and cell phones. And this trend is accelerating in our increasingly networked wireless world. We might use hundreds of computing devices by the end of this decade. Still, we are slaves to our machines. With every new device, we have to learn new commands, languages or interfaces. The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a strategic alliance between the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., has enough of it and wants to give back control to the users. So it launched its 'Pervasive Computing' initiative with the intention to tackle this challenge. In particular, the group wants to develop new technologies to make easier for us to interact with all these computers. This overview contains more details and references about this initiative."

Comments

Long overdue.

[torpor]

Disclaimer: I work for a synthesizer manufacturer.

Synthesizers and other forms of electronic musical instrumentation have been having the same problems as computers.

Nevertheless, the paradigms of "Page Up/Page Down" and "Parameter Left/Right", and "Patch Up/Dn", and "Edit/Play", as horrible as they are, have served 'standard interface' requirements for years. There is a 'standard user interface' in this realm, as crap as it is.

Manufacturers in this market have copied each others interface ideas freely and easily, and it has resulted in an, admittedly hodge-podge, 'general user interface' set of 'music machine hacker' chops. "Multi-mode"/"Single-mode", etc. can generally be found on most modern synth platforms. Any synth geek around knows that the patch +/- keys are the ones you look for first, then the 'filter resonance knob', or whatever.

Computers would do well to learn from the lessons of musical instruments in this regard. It never ceases to amaze me that all these TLA "Initiatives" often disregard even the most obvious examples of solutions to problems... I guess because their grants aren't "directed" to those realms.

In any case, I hope to see some interesting results from CMI. At Access, we're really interested in human/user-interface problems and good ways to solve them ...