The VPSC-powered Info
"WalkMan"
Visualize an
Info WalkMan, with the processing power of a supercomputer and the
form factor of a pair of sunglasses connected to a minidisc player,
and it's always on the Internet. The hardware and software to accomplish
this will abound, but how will it all come together in the user
experience?
Imagine a cocktail
party circa 2010. As you wander about, equipped with your wearable,
you see guests "visually highlighted" according to your own personal
preferences and predilections, subject of course to personal security
constraints. See someone you want to approach, but you don't know
what to say? Not a problem as your wearable provides their name,
interests, perhaps even the potentials for relationships (drawn
from a wide variety of types). The opportunities for forming both
personal and professional relationships are considerable. From a
distance you can tell what drinks are being served at the e-cash
bar and how much they cost, where the bathrooms and fire exits are,
what bands the bass player had previously performed in, and the
ingredients of the strange smelling hors d'oeuvres being offered
you on a serving tray.
Is such a scenario
possible just over 10 years out? Consider the potential technological
developments we've discussed in this series of columns that could
well make this a reality. The flexibility and reconfigurability
of Computing Fabrics presents a new take on the issues of local
vs. remote services and processing, joining (and extending) the
ranks of cellular phones, network computing, and ubiquitous computing.
VPSCs, Virtual
Personal Supercomputers, provide the mobile user with the computing
resources required by their ever changing needs and tasking through
a low-latency connection with nearby resources dynamically assembled
from the local fabric. Such VPSCs will drive personal interface
devices -- wearable computers that provide a human computer interface
via a personal display in a mobile form factor similar to sunglasses
and superior to the user interfaces mediated by all current desktops
and workstations, supporting both immersive experiences as well
as augmented and enhanced reality.
Information
in Context
The web-based
information and services we have grown accustomed to will likely
continue to expand and deepen, but the context in which we access
this information and utilize these services will change dramatically,
due to our newly acquired mobility. Consider for a moment the range
and variety of contexts you personally pass through in the course
of a day. This may include driving through familiar or unfamiliar
territory, riding one or more forms of public transportation, shopping
in physical environments, doing one's job in one or more work environments,
eating - including selecting what you eat, where you eat, and how
your food is prepared, exercising, entertaining, socializing,…you
get the point.
No longer bound
to the desk at work or the sofa at home we will access information
and web-based services throughout our typical and not so typical
days and we will want this information and these services integrated
as seamlessly as possible into our routines.
There's a selective
pressure at work here. If future wearables merely provide mobile
access to expanding web content, but lack tight integration with
a user's changing contexts, then the requirement to break one's
current context, such as shopping, in order to enter a computing
context will restrict the size of the market for such wearables.
How so? Only those people who are both comfortable in a computing
context (e.g., those using the web today) and who are also amenable
to back-and-forth context shifting constitute a potential user base.
On the other
hand, if future wearables provide a seamless integration of web
content within the multiple contexts of a user's day, without breaking
any of those contexts, then the market potential becomes far, far
larger. The big money is in this latter group, not the former. This
opportunity should encourage the development and widespread adoption
of a seamless integration between one's daily contexts and information.
Since physical reality is unlikely to radically shift its form to
support this integration, the onus is on information and services
to shift theirs'.
Enhancing Reality
How can web
content be integrated into daily life? Simply overlaying current
web pages over what we see around us will not do. It is obvious,
in a trivial sense, that current web content, and information displays
in general, are designed to be viewed as a unit. Superimposing that
content over the varying and distracting background of whatever
it is that we happen to be looking at does not constitute integration.
Even if we redesign 2D web pages for overlay viewing through our
personal displays they won't be suited to the task of proper integration
with the world around us because, lacking the dimension of depth,
they'll be unable to direct or attach their content to the objects
of the real 3D world.
How about displaying
content to peripheral vision, somewhat in the sense of James Cameron's
Terminator, or for that matter, the view through a feature-laden
camera's viewfinder, where information readouts surround your view
of the world in a bezel or frame? While this approach should prove
useful for selected information and some applications, it is not
a general solution - peripheral vision simply does not provide sufficient
display space for all the content we want to view at a time. Additionally,
a great preponderance of information requires our focus at the center
or near center of our visual attention. Peripheral display can extend
our visualization with context but does not diminish or off-set
the need for focus.
A few words
should also be mentioned concerning the current vogue where a display
is directed to only one eye, as with the recent IBM wearable and
Virtual Vision announcements. Steve Mann of MIT, who arguably has
had more augmented reality experience than any other human being,
has told me in private conversation that this one-eye approach has
caused significant changes to his own visual system over the course
of over 15 years of daily use. Physically reorganizing the structure
of their Lateral Geniculate Nuclei, occipital cortex, and associative
brain regions is not what the mass market consumer will have in
mind (and neither, I suspect will OSHA, regarding the health of
users in the workplace). So even in overlay mode both eyes should
be engaged.
That leaves
but one major option in my opinion - web content and information
displays of the future must become more like the physical world
with which they are to be integrated. Since we live in a participatory
world of 3 spatial dimensions and one time dimension, our informational
displays and interfaces must also be interactive, 3D, and temporal,
and needless to say, directed to both eyes.
Another example
may help to illustrate this. Consider the varied tasks of home improvement
and maintenance. Equipped with a 3D wearable (wirelessly connected
to a local VPSC accessing the requisite data sources) a home owner
or repairman could see the location of wall studs behind
the wall board, where wiring and plumbing is run, the manufacturer
and style codes of wallpaper (and coordinated paint colors too!),
the history of repairs made to the furnace, central AC, and appliances,
and on and on, potentially just by gazing at the desired object(s)
and selecting the type of information to be revealed. From ubiquitous
computing, where processors abound, we enter ubiquitous information,
where information resides in and enhances nearly all things (or
at least appears to do so). This is just the beginning, with similar
examples arising naturally in commerce, transportation, recreation,
travel, and so forth.
These examples,
however, rely not only on the availability of wearables and the
deployment of flexible and interoperable networking (e.g., Computing
Fabrics) but also on the general deployment of 3D tracking and active
IDs embedded in many items. This is not so far fetched as it first
sounds. The commoditization of GPS circuitry has already begun,
resolving the location of many objects, including wearables (and
by proximity their wearers) to within meters. More local tracking
systems, operating within a room context, for example, will provide
additional resolution, likely down to the centimeter (see Intersense
at www.isense.com and http://www.pinpointco.com
for PinPoint's 3D-iD system).
Additionally,
new packaging technologies for integrated circuits (see www.iButton.com
and www.dalsemi.com) greatly
reduce space consumption and may provide inexpensive digital identity
to a wide range of goods. With VPSC processing power available not
all objects will need to be tracked for them to be identified and
their positions obtained. However, the local presence of a digital
ID could well reduce the ambiguities involved in feature extraction
and object recognition, allowing nearby objects to be identified
and attributed with greater accuracy.
Hyper-Reality
For millennia,
the human knowledge base has remained apart from the rest of the
man made world, residing in libraries, archives, and most recently
web servers. The technologies we've been discussing in this series
could in due course spawn a hyper-reality, re-integrating Man's
knowledge with his artifacts, an appropriate accompaniment to the
escalating convergence between theories of mind and physics of matter.
Hyper-reality,
by enhancing our vision, can provide us with both a deepened as
well as a more abstract view of the world. Without enhancement we
view objects in our world from a single point of view at a time,
and only in their current state. With enhancement we can potentially
visualize an object and its attributes that are within, behind,
latent, implicit, dormant, relational, or historical. A real-time
interactive 3D interface permits objects in the real world to be
attributed wherever and whenever they reside - up, down, left, right,
near, far, inside, outside, past, present, or future. In effect,
hyper-reality brings our conceptual knowledge down to the perceptual
level. Language, spoken and written, was first to cross this chasm
between the conceptual and the perceptual, and we well know the
impact that had on the world. Hyper-reality may take us even farther.
While much of
the evolution of hyper-reality will occur on its own, without pushing
and prodding, there's much to be gained by providing examples and
prototypes that exert a shaping influence and ensure that the human
dimension is well represented. To this end Infomaniacs, working
with Raytheon Systems Company, assembled a project in mid-1998 called
"Distributed Multiuser Visualization Infrastructure and 3D HCI Toolkits"
for DARPA's "Command Post of the Future" program. The 3D HCI toolkits
component of the project provides an integrated development environment
for the declarative creation of hyper-reality applications. Sitting
beneath these toolkits (beneath in an architectural sense) is a
multiuser, real-time 3D infrastructure we call SQL3D, and beneath
that are suitably extended distributed objects to make the whole
ensemble not only multiuser and collaborative but also distributed.
In the next
Information UNBOUND we'll take a look at this project, including
SQL3D. This will begin our transition in this column to the representation
and exploitation of knowledge and information that will support
hyper-realities.
Erick Von Schweber
Information
UNBOUND is produced by Infomaniacs.
(C)
Infomaniacs 1998. All Rights Reserved.
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