ERCIM News is a publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The January 2003 issue is dedicated to Embedded Systems.
This particular article describes the 2WEAR, a three-year EC-funded project that started on January 1, 2001. The goal of FORTH (Greece), ETHZ (Switzerland), MA Systems & Control (UK), and NOKIA/NRC (Finland) is to design the future personal computer as an agglomerate of small, wearable and physically distributed devices.
Here is their vision.
You have just landed in Heraklion. As you leave the airport you are handed a CityPass, a small gadget hosting a map application for the city, which you touch with your ID-Key and put away in your pocket. A few seconds later your wristwatch beeps with a message: "Welcome to Heraklion -- the MapGuide can be controlled using your PDA or your wristwatch".
As you stroll downtown, you shoot several pictures, which are tagged with time and location information retrieved from the GPS on your wristwatch. Storage in the camera begins to run out, and the camera informs you that photos are now being stored in the Assistant in your backpack. At the same time, the Assistant silently uploads the photos to your home repository whenever you pass near a public network access point. You meet a friend at a café and together you browse through the photo collection. You decide to have dinner at an old tavern displayed in one of the pictures. You pull the Notepad out of the backpack and use the CityMap application to display the location of the tavern, using location information from the photo coordinates and your current position provided by the GPS on your wristwatch.
Here is how it will work.
This was the plain english explanation. If you're interested by technical details, please read the whole article.
Source: Spyros Lalis, Anthony Savidis and Constantine Stephanidis, ERCIM News No. 52, January 2003
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