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 COLUMN
Wireless wearable digital jewelry and more This week I thought we'd keep our sunny side up and take a look at some of the interesting work being done in wireless at two corporate labs and at one university research lab. After all, when I'm not writing about cell phones, I'm much less cranky.
Or, let's say you're on vacation, peering through the window of a store that just closed, and you see something you want but your plane leaves first thing in the morning. Not to worry. Your onboard camera captures the image, searches the Internet using QBIC, and locates the item; then, all you need do is depress the input device on your ring to place the order. Obviously, IBM is taking pervasive computing, a phrase most credit Big Blue with coining, very seriously. "If you have something with you all the time, you might as well be able to wear it," says Cameron Miner, the founder of the design lab and lead scientist on the Digital Jewelry project. The jewelry was created by Denise Chan, one of the first to graduate Stanford's masters program in mechanical engineering from the School of Product Design, which combines engineering and art. The thinking behind digital jewelry is that as you push more functionality into pervasive devices, they are getting harder to use: smaller screens, tiny inputs, or just trying to talk and input at the same time; all these become a challenge. By taking the interface apart, putting it in the appropriate places, and allowing them to communicate wirelessly, IBM thinks it has a practical way to solve the problem. So we have a microphone on a pin or necklace, an ear piece on an earring or ear cuff, and a ring with a track point. There's a bracelet with text entry or dialing capability as well, or it might even have a small display. Wearable computers are hot, and IBM is combining that with another emerging technology for the next decade: wireless sensors. Big Blue is already working on something they call "emotion sensing." These are on-body biosensors that monitor your personal area network (PAN) -- another IBM Research phrase for using the body as a communications platform. And so, wirelessly and silently you and your significant other can have an open channel between the two of you. You'll be able to speak the language of love, or any other language, by monitoring your loved one's heartbeat, for instance, from across town. Or perhaps if your emotion-sensing ring turns red, you'd best not go home tonight! For information on all this and more go to www.almaden.ibm.com/. Computer scientists at U.C. Berkeley are using sensors too: SmartDust, they call it, which someday will network any physical environment with sensors microscopic in size, powered by ambient energy, using fractions of a watt of power. (I wonder if you can get a virtual allergy from all that smart dust?) The operating system that manages the mite-sized monitors is called, appropriately enough, TinyOS. SmartDust will be able to monitor events such as light, heat, movement, position, or chemical presence in any area, and upload the information to bigger systems that can evaluate an event and take an action, or if absolutely necessary send the data to a real live person -- probably to their nose ring. There are a lot of names but they all deserve credit: Jason Hill, Robert Szewczyk, Alec Woo, Seth Hollar, David Culler, Kristofer Pister. Go to www.berkeley.edu/about. Not to be out-sensed, AT&T Labs, in Cambridge, United Kingdom, is working on a wireless technology under what they call their Sentient Computing Project that adds sensors to people and devices such as telephones and computers to, as they call it, "maintain a model of the world." Here's the bottom line: wherever you go, your user profiles follows. The phone nearest you becomes your phone with your calls routed to it. The computer nearest you is your computer with your data and your interface appearing on screen. The system uses an ultrasonic location system similar to triangulation but called in this case trilateration, "position-finding by measurement of distances." FYI, triangulation does position finding by the measurement of angles, AT&T Labs says. There are transmitters in ceilings, sensors placed in devices, and tags on your belt. Now, what do you do if two or even three people are standing around the phone? Who owns the call? Well, the spatial monitor -- accurate up to 10 centimeters -- takes care of that. The system determines if "named spaces" are overlapping with spaces defined manually. The system is up and running at the Cambridge labs, and is being used to create what they call a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) environment. VNC will allow users to view their desktop by knowing who you are; remember you're wearing a sensor too, so that it identifies your unique presence. The result is that the system moves a user's desktop along with them. Folks on the Sentient project include Pete Steggles, Rupert Curwen, and Rob Hague. Go to www.uk.research.att.com/spirit/. for more information. Finally, I can't keep away totally from cell phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants). IBM has a project in wireless devices that fall under a stylus-based PDA keyboard design. The goal was to design a keyboard that allowed a user to take the least amount of time moving from one key to the next. After all, the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow a typist down so that the keys wouldn't jam. The final configuration was created by putting millions of words into a database to give the researchers accurate statistics on which letters are most commonly paired together. Then to create the final shape, the research team used something called the Metropolis Variation of the Monte Carlo Method. This formula is used by chemists to predict the configuration of a molecule whose shape can be determined by plugging in the energy expended between atoms. It's based on the principle that an atom's position in a molecule is determined by how much energy it expends bonding with other atoms -- that is, the atoms closest to them. Using the Metropolis formula but plugging in the results of their statistical analysis of letter combinations, the team led by Shumin Zhai, Michael Hunter, and Barton Smith came up with a design where the key caps are configured to cluster around the space keycap, the single most used key. The resulting design is somewhat circular in shape. Tested with users, the keyboard on average increased typing performance by 40 percent over an on-screen QWERTY display. The keyboard utility may be available later this year as a free download on IBM's AlphaWorks Web site, at www.alphaworks.ibm.com. I didn't get a chance to talk about Ericsson labs and what they're doing with Fourth Generation (4G) cell technology, or Lucent and Motorola. I'll just have to save that for another day. But, if you'd like to tease the world with a secret or not-so-secret wireless project that you're working on, e-mail me at ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com, and I will put your project up in lights while keeping your name out of the paper, if you so desire. InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz is based in San Francisco.  RELATED ARTICLES  Do computational fabrics hold the key to the future of the Internet's Web? MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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