Thesis 13


Everyware acts at the scale of the room.

If even the body is subject to colonization by ubiquitous computing, the same is certainly true of the places we spend most of our time in and relate to most readily: architectural spaces of room scale.

As we've seen, most of the early experiments in ubicomp focused on the office environment, and supported the activities that people typically do there. But many aspects of these investigations were applicable to other kinds of spaces and pursuits as well, with processing deployed in features that most rooms have in common: walls, doorways, furniture, and floors.

If you want to provide services to people as they roam freely through a space, it's quite important to know exactly where they are and get some idea of what they might be doing. If their identities have not already been mediated by some other mechanism, it's also useful to be able to differentiate between them. So one strong current of development has concerned the floor beneath our feet, quite literally the perfect platform for sensors able to relay such information.

As far back as 1997, the Olivetti and Oracle Research Lab at the University of Cambridge had developed a prototype Active Floor, which monitored both weight distribution and the time variation of loads. Georgia Tech's Smart Floor followed, improving on Active Floor not least by its attempt to identify users by their "footfall signature," while the University of Florida's Gator Tech Smart House uses flooring throughout with impact sensors capable of detecting falls and reporting them to emergency services.

Two current strains of thinking about smart flooring are represented by very different projects announced within the last year. On one hand, we have NTT DoCoMo's CarpetLAN prototype, which uses weak electrical fields to afford both wireless networking and positioning accurate down to about one meter of resolution. CarpetLAN bears all the marks of a highly sophisticated effort to understand what kinds of functionality can be practically subsumed in a floor.

And then there is inventor Leo Fernekes' Sensacell capacitive sensor grid system, developed in collaboration with architect Joakim Hannerz. It has to be said that Sensacell is not the world's most versatile system. It relies on changes in capacitance to detect presence and location and can therefore pick up conductive objects like the human body, but that's about it. Sensacell returns no load information, offers no way to differentiate between individuals, and certainly isn't designed to establish connections with mobile devices. It's not even necessarily fine-grained enough to distinguish between your transit of a space and the midnight errands of the family cat. And given that its presentation to date has focused on output in the (admittedly quite pretty) form of banks of embedded LEDs, Sensacell seems destined for applications in a relatively narrow swath of high-concept bars, lounges, and retail spaces.

But Sensacell has three big advantages over its predecessors: It's modular, it comes in sizes that conform to the square-foot grid actually used by contractors, and it is commercially available right now. What's more, the luminous cells can be integrated into vertical surfaces, even furniture, and their stream of output data can be jacked into just about any garden-variety PC. The pricing is on the high side, but not absurdly so, and will surely fall in the event of any large-scale production. For all of these reasons, Sensacell is accessible, within reach of the kind of tinkering ubihackers who may be key to the wider spread of everyware.

In addition to flooring, instrumented doorways have also begun to appear. Knowledge of door status can be very useful in context-aware applicationswhether an office door is open or closed can imply something about the relative intensity with which the occupant is engaged in a task, while a change in state is generally a marker that a user is transitioning between one activity and another. But door sensors can also be used simply to count how many people enter or leave a given room. (Fire inspectors might want to take note.) California startup InCom's recent pilot program InClass aimed to cut down on teacher administrative time by doing just this, producing a tally of classroom attendance as students wearing RFID-equipped nametags passed beneath a transom-mounted reader.[*]

[*] Parents objected to the program on privacy concerns, and the system was withdrawn from operation after less than a month.

If the doorway produces both headcounts and inferences about behavior, and the floor is occasionally called upon to be everything from impact detector to transmission medium, walls have it relatively easy. Most ubiquitous projects to date have treated the wall first and foremost as a large-scale display surface, with its use as a communication hub following from this.

This, of course, conforms to a venerable tradition in science fiction, but such ultraflat, ultrawide screens are now on the verge of practical reality. Motorola's Physical Science Research Laboratory recently presented chapters of a prototype carbon nanotube screen 160 cm across diagonally by a single centimeter thick. If either Motorola or its competitors manage to produce nanotube displays at commercial scale, truly wall-spanning displays cannot be far off, although they're still probably years and not months away.

For some interested parties, this may seem like a long time to wait, given the wall-screen's centrality to their visions of the "digital home." In the more elaborate of such schemes, the wall becomes some combination of home theater, videophone, whiteboard, and family scratchpada site where downloaded media objects are delivered for consumption, a communication medium in its own right, and the place where other networked devices in the home are managed.

You can already buy appliances ostensibly designed with such distributed control in mind: the first generation of Internet-capable domestic appliances, typified by LG's suite of refrigerator, air conditioner, microwave, and washing machine.

Whatever their merits as appliances, however, they completely fail to capitalize on their nature as networked devices capable of communicating with other networked devices, which tends to rule out the more interesting sorts of interaction that might otherwise be envisioned. Users address LG's appliances one by one, via a superficially modified but otherwise entirely conventional Windows interface; the advertised functionality is limited to use cases that must have struck even the marketing department as forced. The webcam-equipped refrigerator, for example, lets family members send each other video memos, while the air conditioner offers new patterns of airflow for download, presumably as one would download polyphonic ring tones. The "Internet" microwave is even worse, forcing a user to connect an external PC to the Web to download recipes.

True utility in the digital room awaits a recognition that the networked whole is distinctly more than the sum of its parts. In contrast with such piecemeal conceptions, there have been others that approached the ubiquitous systems operating in a space as a unified whole.

The MIT Tangible Media Group's 1998 prototype ambientROOM was one such pioneering effort. Built into a free-standing Steelcase office cubicle of around fifty square feet, ambientROOM was nothing if not an exercise in holism: The entire space was considered as an interface, using lighting and shadow, sound cues, and even the rippled reflection of light on water to convey activity meaningful to the occupant. The sound of birdsong and rainfall varied in volume with some arbitrary quantity set by a userboth the "value of a stock portfolio" or the "number of unread e-mail messages" were proposed at the time[*]while "active wallpaper" took on new qualities in reaction to the absence or presence of people in a nearby conference room.

[*] Conveying the quantity of unread e-mail is apparently an eternal goal of such systems, while explicitly calling out one's stock portfolio as something to be tracked by the minute seems to have been an artifact of the go-go, day-trading era in which ambientROOM was designed.

Projects like ambientROOM begin to suggest how systems made up of media hubs, wall-screens, networked refrigerators, and all the other appurtenances of room-scale everyware might work when designed in recognition of the person at their heart.

Some of the first to get a taste of this in real life have been high-margin frequent travelers. Since mid-2005, rooms at the Mandarin Oriental in New york have loaded preference files maintained on a central server when the hotel's best customers check in, customizing settings from the shades to the thermostat, lining up entertainment options, and loading frequently dialed numbers into the phone.[*] "Digital home" solutions that propose to do many of the same things in a domestic setting can be expected to reach the market in the near term, though whether they'll afford experiences of reasonably seamless ubiquity is debatable.

[*] As you may have suspected, yes, the hotel does keep track of what you're watching. The potential for embarrassment is real, and is something we'll deal with extensively in Chapters 6 and 7.

And so we see it cropping up again, here at the scale of the room, this pattern that may by now seem familiar to you: Our discussions of everyware have much less to do with some notional future than they do with a blunt inventory of products already finding their way to market.



Everyware. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
ISBN: 0321384016
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 124

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