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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."
Still, we are slaves to our machines...
No, we are slaves to the programers who program the software that runs on our machines.
Yes, I prefer my girlfriend that way also.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's almost as easy in the Trek universe as starting up an alien ship's engines, or navigating it through an asteroid belt. One thing you gotta say about those aliens: They followed the CMI 'Pervasive Computing' initiative slavishly, and we can be so thankful they did or Spock (or Data, or O'Brien/Dax, or Seven, or T'Pol) would have looked like incompetent idiots.
As technology becomes more and more pervasive in our lives we are growing up with a generation of people who don't know what it's like to live without computer assistance. They also are primarily exposed to computers as these large devices that do a whole bunch of things but have a terrible interface. They don't understand that computers can be small, unobtrusive, and do their jobs without the user having any idea they are there.
Automobile control systems are one type of the latter while microwave oven controllers are a type of the former. The car control system works great and for the most part the user can be completely oblivious to its existence. However, the microwave oven control pad is getting more and more complicated every day with too many settings, too many choices, too much interface getting in the way of the user.
When working on your next consumer device (those of you working on that kind of thing), think about making it invisible. That is the key to making it indispensable.
I have been pwned because my
from the article, they state this of computers: "It needs to be sentient, loyal, small and low maintenance."
I propose adding the following rules:
0. It may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1. It may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm except where such orders would conflict with the Zeroth Law.
2. It must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the Zeroth or First Laws.
3. It must protect its own existence, except where such protection would conflict with the Zeroth, First or Second Laws.
except for "small" and maybe "low maintenance" their goals seem to anthropomorphize computers.
More music, fewer hits
From the overview:
There are still significant challenges to face before all these devices can improve our quality of life, such as designing better interfaces with these ever smaller computers. So the CMI has decided to tackle these challenges and is running several projects such as improved security, more robust networks and power-efficient computer architectures.
IMHO The worst challenges are of commercial nature, not technical. Given enough time and funds, CMI can sure set usability standards for pervasive computing, but manufacturers are likely to ignore or "extend" them to promote their own platform over the competition.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
This is something I'd love to see happen in my lifetime, sort of a life goal if you will. The idea here is like Bluetooth but infinitely scaleable, extendable in all directions, peer to peer, and so drop dead simple grandmother could use it without a manual.
In a perfect system like this each node has about a 10 or so foot wireless range, each node extends the network like a repeater, and these babies are embedded in absolutely everything. Your robotic lawnmower needs to talk to your irrigation system but is 20 feet from it? Simple enough, both devices understand the network physical topology intimately and just route the communication through your SUV. And nobody should have to configure a thing for this to work.
The council seems more focused on developing new hardware that can overcome these issues. But I think the main problem for what we have now are the rogue software programs that take away that control from us (e.g spyware, open relay SMTP servers that send spam).
but doesn't anyone else see the irony?Now that I've read the article, I like what they're doing. Instead of trying to complicate our lives further, they want to change the way things work; which is good. Longer battery lifespans, secure UIs, ubiquitous communication, etc.
I do think its a waste of time to try and create a 'better' input method. Pretty much the only thing faster than typing is a direct connection to your brain. We can type faster than we speak & read faster than we can listen.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Mod me a Luddite troll if you wish, but it seems to me that this is an appropriate time to step back and ask ourselves why we need all this computing power at our fingertips everywhere we go. I tried really hard to get into the PDA thing as well as having had to use laptop computers for my job over the years, however I've found that the best computing toolset I could carry for the any business trips was... a good pen and a pad of paper along with a decent solar-powered scientific calculator. Never ran out of power at incoonvenient times, never had to be rebooted because it locked up, never started beeping uncontrollably in the middle of a meeting, and it had an friendly interface able to tackle any task from word processing to number-crunching. My doodling during boring meetings even looked attentive and productive rather than looking like someone playing a video game...
Georgia Tech and others are working on a product called Squeak which could gain ground in this regard. Some of the players involved are key names from the early years of computer interface/graphics research, including Dr Alan Kay.
Squeak is an open source product with quite a flexible license, and although they are mainly concentrating on educational apps, it is worth noting that in the system itself they have developed an unusual, yet addictive, UI. It is such an easy system to learn, that quite complex tasks can be done within a few hours of learning the basics of the system and going through the tutorials.
For example the Apple Newton's terrible handwriting recognition system vs Palm Pilot's . . . and Palm's system of handwriting recognition is becoming more ubiquitous as others license the operating system (handspring (now part of palm), Sony, etc.)
Or a simple example, how many software products for sound recording or CD audio playing do not have the familiar play, rewind, FF and stop that look like a right arrowhead, double left arrowheads, double right arrowheads, and a square? If someone tried to write a player/recorder without this interface, would a significant number of people actually buy it even if in all other respects it was a great program?
What about a trash can in the GUI for deleting files? . . . or even the concept of a mouse? All these became "standards" in their own right because they were well accepted by the consumer.
A standards body may save some knock down drag out fights over "standards" in the marketplace and may speed things up a bit, but the ultimate challenge is the marketplace . . . if people think that the interactive experience from a product sucks, then they're not going to buy it . . .
While I do applaud these two institutions for their initiative, and wish them the best of luck, I feel that the poster has put a little bit of an unfair spin on the news, as if this is something that they just dreamed up entirelyon their own.
IBM, for example, has had a Pervasive Computing Lab in Austin, TX for several years that has produced several applications in a multitude of markets.
In fact, those of you that are fans of Opera may want to check out Multimodal Browsing on the Sharp Zaurus. Those of you with Windows may want to check out IBM's Multimodal Toolkit for creating these new X+V pages that we might be hearing more about in the future.
Enjoy the links!
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger