Sunday, March 23, 2003


[Via this post on Interconnected.]

I've been interested in ubiquitous computing for a long time, and the stuff they are doing at Ambient Devices has really got me excited. I love the simplicity and elegance of their devices. I love their decidedly low-tech aesthetic--particularly the meters [QuickTime movie]. They are so analog. So warm. I like the proximity sensors in the picture frames [QuickTime movie] and their use for monitoring distributed presence, too.

More generally on the topic of ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp, as it is apparently called by the cool kids), I really liked the statement on this page that "[u]biquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality". We oughtn't try so hard to virtualize reality. We should augment it. Make the virtual real rather than make the real virtual. We have so much capacity for information processing as humans, and we're really only tapping such a small part of it. For the most part, we confine ourselves to looking at a screen of text. Meanwhile, there is unused visual bandwidth in our peripheral vision, auditory bandwidth that is almost completely unused, tactile sense, etc.

There is so much more stuff I'd like to put into this, but I need to go ahead and post, too. Maybe I'll remember to follow up later.
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