I don't know if you've already heard about Oxygen , a major MIT research project. It was initiated in 1999 by Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, who died of a heart attack last August.
[He] foresaw a future in which computing power was as cheap, plentiful, and necessary as the air we breathe. For Dertouzos, that meant that MIT should lead the way in making these computes as easy to use as it is to breathe. This human-centric vision of computing led him to launch the Oxygen project in 1999, with seed funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
His successor, Victor Zue, shares the vision of a computer-saturated world. ''In five to 10 years, in developed countries, computing and communications are essentially going to be free, pervasive, everywhere,'' said Zue. ''It's going to be in your walls, in your cars, on your body.''
At the MIT, they're busy developing new interfaces for speech recognition for instance, working for a day when computers will understand people whatever the words used.
[For example,] a user can say, ''What's the temperature?'' or ''How hot is it?'' Either way, the system provides the right answer.
This project has many different goals. Consider this one -- even if it looks a little bit obsessional coming from an MIT Director.
Oxygen-based computers must also understand each other, instantly sharing information in order to serve their human masters. Consider Zue's penchant for physical fitness. ''I stand in front of my bathroom scale. Every day I measure myself,'' he says. ''Then I religiously go to the PC, go into the spreadsheet and type those numbers into that. That's stupid.'' What Zue wants is a scale that instantly transmits his weight to his PC. That means building wireless networking capability into millions of ordinary devices.
Let's jump to the conclusion of the article.
It's likely that the successful Oxygen products will gradually seep into our daily lives without fanfare - a speech-activated dishwasher, perhaps, or a car with wireless networking that automatically pays for its own gasoline. Eventually, we'll be surrounded with these devices, scarcely able to live without the stuff. Just like Oxygen.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the Oxygen Project, you can read these two articles by Eric S. Brown published by the MIT Technology Review: "Project Oxygen's New Wind" and "Persuasive, Pervasive Computing."
Source: Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe Staff, Aug. 12, 2002
6:19:34 PM
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