Back to the Future of Ubicomp

In his 2012 publication titled “What next, Ubicomp? Celebrating an intellectual disappearing act” [1] Gregory D. Abowd revises 21 years of ubicomp research. By assessing the status quo in direct comparison with Mark Weiser’s inspiring vision (articulated in his influential article “The computer for the 21st century” [4] from 1991) he highlights three unique contributions achieved in this particular context:

  • Ubicomp technologies facilitate application-based research being conducted outside the lab in the real word.
  • It has become a common approach to make use of existing capabilities for practical deployment of new sensing services.
  • Ubicomp research is “truly multidisciplinary” because its technologies can be used to address “real world problems” of other domains.

These three contributions have certainly fuelled third generation computing and brought it close to Mark Weiser’s original vision of technologies that “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” [4:3]. Mobile/smart phones, tablet computers, programmable microcontrollers and off-shelf sensor/actuator components have become valid materialisations of Weiser’s concepts of tabs, pads and boards. Theoretically, they provide the means to embed computation in any object of everyday life. However, practically this only applies for tech-savvy individuals who have the required know-how, and even in present day reality (three years after Abowd wrote his paper) many computing devices still are objects in their own right and accordingly distinguishable.

left: ubicomp pioneers at Xerox PARC as shown in Weiser's article right: recent photo of a smart meeting room
left: ubicomp pioneers at Xerox PARC as shown in Weiser’s article
right: recent photo of a smart meeting room

To go or not to go?
From this perspective, the author’s main argument is definitely justified: He makes an explicit appeal that it is time for ubicomp to “disappear”. However, to become truly indistinguishable from everyday life it needs to become mainstream and “put the creative controls into the hands of designers and domain experts” [1:38] (or ultimately any application end-user).

Of course, such a radical call for dissolution (however constructive it was meant) is likely to result in an academic debate or even an identity crisis of the (supposedly) specialised ubicomp research community. 2 years later, Liu et al. [2] reacted on this debate by applying co-word analysis and graph theory on 1636 papers published within the community. Their main findings suggested a growing research community, a trending focus on mobile devices and sensing and the whole field becoming more cohesive. Liu et al.’s work therefore refutes the assertion of an identity crisis and indicate rather a certain countermovement to disappearing. However, I think it might be too early to make a real prediction that this will be a continuing persistence trend. In the long run I am tempted to rather believe in Abowd’s (and also Weiser’s) vision that it will no longer be easy to distinguish “our own physical being and our sense of identity […] from elements of computing” [1:38] rather than in the assumption that we will still carry more or less the same mobile technology with us.

An example of ubiquitous computing technology

For this week’s task I chose a recent paper by some of our OpenLab colleagues which was presented at this year’s UbiComp conference: “Diri – the Actuated Helium Balloon: A Study of Autonomous Behaviour in Interfaces” [3] It describes a prototype-based study to explore perceptions of tangible autonomous interfaces. Two helium balloons were equipped with sensors, actuators and microcontrollers so that they could navigate autonomously in a room. In regard to Abowd’s argumentation the study can be seen as an instance of applications motivated research (exploring the human perception of autonomous technology which might have implications for future design). It also qualifies as ubicomp technology because it incorporates most of the identified ubicomp contibutions: Diri works outside the lab (despite a certain escape risk outdoors), it shows explicit DIY mentality (cf. the Instructables tutorial) and it uses state-of-the-art technologies for a new application. The exploration study might not be truly multidisciplinary per se, but its results could still be interesting for social science research, too.

References

  1. Gregory D Abowd. 2012. What next, ubicomp? Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing – UbiComp ’12: 31. http://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370222
  1. Yong Liu, Jorge Goncalves, Denzil Ferreira, Simo Hosio, and Vassilis Kostakos. 2014. Identity crisis of ubicomp? Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing – UbiComp ’14 Adjunct: 75–86. http://doi.org/10.1145/2632048.2632086
  1. Diana Nowacka, Nils Y Hammerla, Chris Elsden, Thomas Pl, and David Kirk. 2015. Diri – the Actuated Helium Balloon : A Study of Autonomous Behaviour in Interfaces. UbiComp ’15 Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 349–360.
  1. Mark Weiser. 1991. The computer for the 21st century. SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communication Review 3, 3: 3–11. http://doi.org/http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/329124.329126

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