Carlos Manuel Rodrigues Machado Autonomic Ubiquitous Computing

1.2 The Ubiquitous Computing Vision
The vision of ubiquitous computing was developed by the Xerox PARC researcher, Mark
Weiser, in the late eighties and early nineties. His landmark article with the title ´The Computer for
the 21st Century` [Weiser, 1991] starts off with the following sentences:
“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]
Weiser’s vision is one of a “computer” that disappears into the background. This does not
mean that the computer visually disappears, but that it is used in a transparent way. During
everyday tasks, a ubiquitous computing system would be used repeatedly without users`
acknowledgement or involvement. The motivation for this vision comes from technologies that are
part of our daily live, which are constantly and effortlessly used. The electricity is an example of
technology that is used to power almost everything and people only think about it when no
electricity is available.
Besides the notion of the computer disappearing into the environment, several other terms
describe different aspects of ubiquitous computing. Weiser’s vision of seamlessly integrating
computers into the physical world is opposed to many of today’s design principles. A seamless
integration of technology into the real world would allow people to be totally unaware of technology
underlying a service. Calm technology as described by Weiser [Weiser and Brown, 1995] stresses
the point that good technology should not intrude on our lives, but live along with us, in a calmer
way. The vision of calm technology was an inspiration for many projects in the areas of ambient
and peripheral displays. Embodied virtuality is a term that was invented to explicitly bring out the
ideas that computers can be brought into the physical world. This part of the vision was taken
literally in the work of [Ishii and Ullmer, 1997] and in the work followed by many others in the area
of tangible interfaces.
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