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I will be giving a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio on Friday 14th May entitled ‘A brief history of the future of pervasive media’, which is broadly derived from my PhD research. The talk will be open to the public, so please feel free to come along! Here’s the bumpf:
Pervasive media, and the [...]
I was checking out the very engaging ‘Milestones‘ timeline on the PARC website and came across an image that evoked a sense of deja vu. The other place I had seen something very similar was in a Microsoft ‘Future Vision of Manufacturing‘ video. Here [...]
The following is an edited excerpt from my PhD thesis, which articulates the various ways we might understand what we mean by ‘ubiquitous computing’
‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser, 1991).
‘The goal is to achieve [...]
This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently [...]
Timo Arnall points out this video, by a masters student(!), that depicts a slightly nightmarish, yet amusingly ironic, vision of a possible future world with augmented reality, whereby you earn money by subjecting yourself to advertising and depend upon instructions from the system for even basic tasks.
The latter half of [...]
“Coined by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), [Ubiquitous Computing] describes a vision of the future. Just as electric motors have disappeared into the background of everyday life, PARC scientists envision a future where mobile computational devices will be similarly transparent. Potentially numbering the 100s per person these devices [...]
In 1990 Motorola produced a video depicting a Ubicomp type vision that was a little more conservative than some other ‘vision videos’ being produced around the same time but has many of the usual constituent elements. What is striking is that the use of mobile phones must have been ‘futuristic’ then but one can’t help [...]
NTT Docomo have created a few vision videos (but this one is easily accessible via YouTube), many seemed to target the end of this decade. The video below uses yet another schmultzy storyline full of pathos in which to situate (and thus ‘humanise’) apparently futuristic everyday technologies. NTT Docomo depict a rather unsettlingly monolithic future [...]
Liz Goodman pointed out this peculiar ubicomp style vision of the apparently everyday being disrupted by disaster. I would echo Liz’s criticism that it (rather poorly) depicts a pretty awful future. Another (recent) ‘past computing future’ video to add to the list though.
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