Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [80]
* If Sony had chosen not to cripple the LIBRIÉ with unreasonably restrictive content and rights-management policies, it's very likely that you, too, would have seen the device. As it is, Sony's regrettable distrust of its own customers has ensured that an otherwise-appealing product ends up atop the dustbin of history.
The LIBRIÉ owes much of its oooooh factor to E Ink's proprietary microencapsulation technology—a technology which, it must be said, is impressive in many regards. The quality that leaps out at someone encountering it for the first time is its dimensionality. The technique allows conformal screens of so-called "electronic paper" to be printed to the required specifications, and this can result in some striking applications, like the rather futuristic watch prototype the company has produced in collaboration with Seiko, a gently curving arc a few millimeters thick. But it's also versatile—large-scale prototype displays have been produced—and astonishingly vibrant, and it's easy to imagine such units replacing conventional displays in the widest possible variety of applications.**
** None of this is to neglect that other common trope of ubicomp imaginings, the wall- or even building-scale display. A friend once proposed, in this regard, that the Empire State Building be lit each night with a display of color tuned to function as a thermometer—a kind of giant ambient weather beacon.
Nor is E Ink the only party pursuing next-generation displays. Siemens offers a vanishingly thin "electrochromic" display potentially suitable for being printed on cardboard, foil, plastic and paper. These are being envisioned, initially at least, for limited-lifetime applications such as packaging, labels, and tickets; when combined with printable batteries such as those produced by Israeli startup Power Paper, the Minority
Report scenario of yammering, full-motion cereal boxes is that much closer to reality.
Commercial products using the E Ink technology, including the Seiko watch, are slated for introduction during 2006; Siemens, meanwhile, plans to introduce 80-dpi electrochromic packaging labels (at a unit cost of around 30 cents) during 2007. The inference we can draw from such developments is that the challenges posed by a general requirement for highly legible ambient display are well on their way to being resolved, at a variety of scales. As a consequence, we can regard the issue of display as posing no further obstacle to the development of ubiquitous systems requiring them.
Thesis 63
The necessary wireless networking protocols already exist.
If IPv6 gives us a way to identify each of the almost unimaginably rich profusion of nodes everyware will bring into being, we still need to provide some channel by which those nodes can communicate with each other. We already have some fairly specific ideas of what such a channel should look like: Most of our visions of ubiquity presuppose a network that:
is wireless;
provides broadband;
affords autodiscovery;
is available wherever you might go.
As it happens, each of them is neatly answered by a brace of emerging (and in some cases conflicting) networking standards.
At ultra-short range, a new standard called Wireless USB is intended by its developers to succeed Bluetooth in the personal area networking (PAN) role during 2006-2007, connecting printers, cameras, game controllers, and other peripherals. Supported by the WiMedia Alliance, an industry coalition that counts HP, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony among its mainstays, Wireless USB is—like similar ultrawide-band (UWB) protocols—a low-power specification affording connection speeds of up to 480 Mbps. Undeterred, the industry alliance responsible for Bluetooth—the Bluetooth