Logging onto the Internet using a wireless phone or pocket computer may seem thoroughly modern to you and me, but to people who work on technology’s leading edge this is old stuff. They say the Internet’s smashing success combined with expanding microprocessor power will soon spawn new kinds of connections that will radically change the way we live.
We’re heading toward an era of what the experts call “pervasive computing,” when few aspects of daily life will remain untouched by computer chips and networks.
It will be a very different world indeed, where most machines will communicate with each other and people will commonly speak to inanimate objects such as doors, refrigerators and toasters.
But even the engineers who are inventing this new world are a bit perplexed about just where they’re taking us. Many gathered just outside Washington last month to trade ideas at a federally sponsored conference on pervasive computing in Gaithersburg, Md.
When a snowstorm shut down the government for two days and left the computer wizards on their own, they found some available hotel meeting rooms and morphed the conference into a semiformal confab.
Even many employees of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the conference sponsor, braved the weather to join the group at the hotel.
And free-ranging the discussion was. The co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., Bill Joy, said that it’s now possible to make shirts containing washable microprocessors and tiny microphones that would enable wearers to communicate effortlessly, but he didn’t make the argument there’s any market for such products just now.
Joy also described the spread of wireless phones that is creating new and unplanned network opportunities industry may exploit.
For example, by just tracking and correlating the many cell phone signals given off by drivers in traffic, it is possible to construct a good running picture of the worst rush-hour bottlenecks as they form. A California firm has developed technology to do this.
But with just a little imagination you could take this a bit further, Joy said.
“Not only can you tell where the worst jams are on the freeway,” he said, “but you might even get information that a friend of yours with his cell phone in his pocket is sitting in a restaurant you’re driving by, and the network might even direct you to a parking space so you could stop and drop in to see your friend.”
Joy estimates that in the near future most wireless phones will be hooked into 10 different networks at a minimum, with only a few of them devoted to the phone’s voice communication functions.
That’s probably a safe prediction. There are at least four technology products in development right now intended to facilitate wireless communications between computers, phones, pagers and the like.
The developers envision a world where the cell phone in your pocket and the pager on your belt will not only be in regular communication with each other, but they’ll also be scanning the immediate environment for other devices of interest.
Your phone might locate a nearby fax machine, for instance, that could be recruited to make a hard copy of a letter that arrived in your message center.
In fact, researchers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., are building prototypes of products that would facilitate just such machine-to-machine communication.
Mark Smith, H-P’s manager of appliances and media systems, said at last month’s conference that a personal communications product would provide certain identification of its owner, using biologic cues such as retinal patterns, DNA or some combination.
The personal communicator would also wirelessly scan the environment to assess ways to serve its owner as he traveled from place to place.
By communicating with nearby gadgets, H-P’s communicator might arrange things so that when a visitor sat down to a PC in a strange office, the machine would be configured to work just like the user’s home computer.
Under Smith’s scenario, this kind of hospitality would accompany a person wherever he went.
Without saying a word you could let the wine-shop owner know your taste in rare vintages, and the haberdasher would have all your up-to-date measurements as you stepped into the shop.
But the beauty of this product would be that even as it spreads personal information far and wide to enhance the customer’s experience, it would also protect his privacy, Smith said.
“What we mean by appliance is that if it’s there, you just use it,” Smith said. “It works the way you expect and does what you want without any complications.”
The various bits of personal information provided to facilitate easy functionality would be linked to the personal communicator someone carries, but giving out that information to the various machines outside is under control of the individual user.
“You should be confident that how much beer you’re buying isn’t going to find its way into a database that your employer will see,” Smith said. “This technology gives us the ability to assure your privacy.”
Of course, this new world would require that most appliances be turned on most of the time so they could communicate whenever necessary.
That raises questions about energy efficiency, said Smith, who did a study that found electronics appliances can use more electricity than people might expect.
Running a personal computer around the clock without a monitor sucks up $137 worth of juice a year, Smith said. Having several devices on all the time in a home could add up to hefty monthly bills.
The good news is that H-P engineers have found ways to cut power consumption while actually enhancing performance of some information appliances, Smith said.
But even as the technology to promote pervasive computing moves ahead, the applications are still somewhat cloudy.
Craig Mundie, a senior vice president for consumer strategy at Microsoft Corp., said that soon our trash compactors may be equipped with sensors to chronicle our garbage “so that when you throw away a box of Wheaties, you know to get another box.”
Just as motors of all kinds are installed in everything from car doors to can openers to ease work once done by muscles, Mundie said, chips will soon be ubiquitous to help our brains.
Refrigerators and toasters are likely to talk to each other and to us, Bill Mark, vice president of information and computing services at SRI International. Even more spooky, perhaps, is that these machines may not only listen to us, but also watch us to get clues from our body language and gestures.
“It can be quite awkward at first, talking to a refrigerator,” Mark said. “But once you get past the weirdness of talking to an object and look at it as talking to your food manager, well then, it’s not so bad.”
The problem just now is that speech communication technology needs improvement, which is why SRI is looking at ways to supplement the oral talk with visual cues.
Mark and others suggested that as household appliances discover shortages in the family larder, they’ll pass along the information to the family car that in turn will know when passing a store to remind the driver to stop in and pick up the needed items.
Although there is much enthusiasm among the technowizards for more communications between consumers and their appliances, at least a few suggested this view of the future is probably not going to happen because it amounts to techno-overkill.
“It’s cool that a machine can tell you `I’m out of Wheaties.’ But do I care?” asked H-P’s Mark Smith. “Technology can be machine-centric or person-centric. The real question to ask is `Will this serve us?’ I think it is beneficial to configure your environment in ways that meet your particular needs. But I’m not sure that I want machines to be nagging me about buying more cereal.”
