Ubiquitous computing

Researchers predict that computing will soon break out of the confines of your personal computer and that microprocessors will begin to embed themselves in an array of every day objects: walls, desks, light sockets, doorknobs are only the beginning. They will all be linked by the information superhighway. Researchers call it 'ubiquitous computing'.

To shave your electric bills, the system might keep your water heater turned off until it sensed you were waking up. (It could start your coffee too.) Your morning paper, either printed or on a paperlike screen, might focus on stories of special interest to you. The downside of such tailored reportage is that one of the glues holding our disparate society together - everybody getting roughly the same news every day - would break down.

Your car might be driven automatically by a central traffic controller, or the controller might suggest routes for avoiding slowdowns. You could easily work at home, setting a computer pad to show you video images of your co-workers. Another pad might show your spouse or children as they went through the day. You also could live virtually anywhere. One anthropologist at the Xerox's innovations laboratories - the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) - hopes that the system will enable her to live in Costa Rica. And the world could, to some extent, customise itself just for you. 'I would be able to walk up to a Xerox machine in Japan and it would automatically show me the instructions in English as I walk by,' says computer scientist Marvin Theimer. If your flight to Europe were delayed three hours, he said, your airline's computer could call your house and reset your alarm clock. Not only that: the computer could transmit a notice to your screen at home explaining why you got to sleep late. 'And you'd never have to worry about leaving your oven on - you could turn it off from your airliner,' he added.

He said computing already is becoming ubiquitous. 'Virtually every coffee machine now has a microprocessor inside and so do cars. But it's all stand-alone, and the next big step will be to interconnect it all.' Corporations, according to Theimer, will re-invent themselves. Workers will no longer be tied to a central building. And at any time you could instantly canvas your co-workers for somebody with expertise on a particular question facing you, no matter where in the world you were, just by jotting a note on your pad and sending it out through the system.

Right now, Theimer said, PARC is experimenting with the notion that a fair amount of corporate business is transacted around the coffee pot. Its researchers are working on a 'social virtual reality project' in which workers can wander into a 'virtual' coffee room that exists only inside the computer system.