Ubiquitous Computing = Cloud + LBS
It was 1991 when a researcher from PARC, whose name I don’t remember, gave a lecture at my university about something called Ubiquitous Computing.
It was 2 years before I finished university and Smalltalk, Lisp and Prolog where the hottest things in computer science for me so far. But what I heard at this lecture was far more than I could grasp at the time and I always remembered the lecture during the next 20 years. I couldn’t imagine that one day those things should become reality, but to be honest with you, we are still missing some of the stuff that was presented back there.
Today I started to search for some of the stuff on Google and guess what, I actually found an article in the CIO magazine which basically talks about some of the stuff the guy presented 20 years ago.
What has been described here is essentially a form of cloud computing and something we call location-based services, not using a smartphone, but a device called Intelligent Badge.
The Intelligent Badge is little wearable device that can be tracked using a tracking infrastructure inside buildings or other dedicated areas. The system consisting of the tracking infrastructure and a computing device can simply track all wearers of devices over time being able to put badges in context. The system is able to detect that lets say John is in the same room as Peter at the same time attending a meeting.
This context information can now be used to index documents that have been created on the computer system now being able to do a global search of the kind, show me the document I have created in the meeting with Peter a week ago. No problem.
Even though the badge is a rather passive device, it provides almost the same functionality as a smartphone that uses a built-in GPS to track its position on a location-based service.
I remember the discussion that started after the lecture about privacy concerns and the way the PARC researchers dealt with this: at any point you could remove the badge from your jacket and put it on your desk simply disabling the tracking functionality.
Another indexing functionality that was developed back then was the ability to record audio inside meetings while taking notes on a notepad. After the meeting you could easily click on one of the notes and you simply got a playback of what has been recorded at this specific time. Does that ring a bell? Livescribe? Well, this is exactly what the Anoto-technology based pen does.
Based on those few examples you can imagine how impressed I was at the time, when we didn’t have the technology nor the computing power to actually achieve something like that affordable for the masses but actually doable in a prototype. 20 years later, there is nothing that prevents us from doing something like this.
So what’s the next thing we consider to be most common in 20 years from now?
P.S. I am not done yet: i want to find a research paper on that as well
