Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Researchers at Philips Electronics have built a two-story, 200-square-meter house in which scientists have hidden 34 cameras and 24 microphones to record how people interact with new technology. As part of its PHENOM Project Philips refers to this wiring of living and working environments “ambient intelligence.” The company believes that distributed computing is coming to the consumer, and that these inexpensive computing components will become common in every house. Meanwhile, Microsoft, through its EasyLiving project, is studying how computers can signal people, and people can signal computers as they move through “intelligent” rooms that turn on media players and adjust thermostats. Several prominent universities are working on similar projects: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with its House_n and Living Lab projects, and the Georgia Institute of Technology with its Aware Home Research Initiative. At Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, engineers have outfitted rooms with beacons that broadcast URLs to handheld devices. The signals, sent over wireless networks, target people passing through the digitally-equipped area and are intended to help them locate information and services. Cooltown, as HP calls this “location-aware” system, is part of the company’s nomadic computing research, which focuses on how to tie Web resources to physical objects and places.