Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing
Ubiquitous computing is reckoned as the new wave or The Third Age in computing. Mainframe Computing involved a single mainframe being shared by many users. Personal Computing places man and machine face-to-face. The next age, known as the Third Age of computing, or the age of calm technology, is when technology fades into the background of our lives rather than taking the limelight, subtly but surely playing a vital role in the fabric of human society.
Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" of computing.
Mark Weiser, considered the father of ubiquitous computing, explains a little about this new field in his paper, has this to say about this exciting new field:
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."
Among the papers that express the basic elements that make up the ubiquitous computing philosophy, two are listed here: "Open House" (also in a MS Word version) , and "Designing Calm Technology" .
Virtual Reality and Ubiquitous Computing
Ubiquitous computing is more or less the reverse of virtual reality. Where virtual reality creates a world and brings people inside it, ubiquitous computing brings the computer to live out here in the 'real' world with people, without trying to limit or dominate the environment of human interactions.
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Wearable and Mobile Computing
A major trend emerging in advanced human-computer interaction is the freedom of mobility without loss of computing power. Wearable computers are designed to provide computing and communication resources while being completely portable and unconstrained by wires. Moreover, it is integrated into the personal space of the user ensuring operational constancy, i.e. always on and always accessible.
Wearable computing technology explores ways to assist people in everyday social encounters like when shopping, or riding the elevators, or car-pooling. Wearable and Mobile computing deals with the main issue of how to facilitate or augment social interactions such that it will positively affect the way this technology helps people interact and form communities?"
Wearables are typically composed of a devices that can be worn on the belt, or as headgear, or can be incorporated into jackets or shoes, consisting of wireless communications hardware and an input device such as touchpad or chording keyboard. Wearable devices have been demonstrated in a several real world applications like aircraft maintenance, navigational assistance and vehicle mechanics as having dramatically improved user performance, reducing task time by half in some cases.
[Wired
News Article on Wearable Communities...]
Ubiquitous computing and wearable computing have been posed as polar opposites even though they are often applied in very similar applications. Ubiquitous computing involves incorporating sensors and cameras in the environment as a background device, and therefore evidently has privacy issues in communications as well as the problem of personalizing the information for each user. Wearable computing apparently overcomes this by putting the sensors on the user rather than the general environment thus overcoming the privacy issue, at the same time, it suffers from the localization problem. CUPCAKE aims to explore the two seemingly complementary problems in an attempt to integrate them seamlessly.