Project Oxygen
VisionFor over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. They have been difficult to use. They have required us to interact with them on their terms, speaking their languages and manipulating their keyboards or mice. They have not been aware of our needs or even of whether we were in the room with them. Virtual reality only makes matters worse: with it, we do not simply serve computers, but also live in a reality they create.
In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter the human world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more while doing less. We will not need to carry our own devices around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will adopt our information personalities. They will respect our desires for privacy and security. We won't have to type, click, or learn new computer jargon. Instead, we'll communicate naturally, using speech and gestures that describe our intent ("send this to Hari" or "print that picture on the nearest color printer"), and leave it to the computer to carry out our will. New systems will boost our productivity. They will help us automate repetitive human tasks, control a wealth of physical devices in the environment, find the information we need (when we need it, without forcing our eyes to examine thousands of search-engine hits), and enable us to work together with other people through space and time.
In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter the human world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more while doing less. We will not need to carry our own devices around with us. Instead, configurable generic devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, whenever we need it and wherever we might be. As we interact with these "anonymous" devices, they will adopt our information personalities. They will respect our desires for privacy and security. We won't have to type, click, or learn new computer jargon. Instead, we'll communicate naturally, using speech and gestures that describe our intent ("send this to Hari" or "print that picture on the nearest color printer"), and leave it to the computer to carry out our will. New systems will boost our productivity. They will help us automate repetitive human tasks, control a wealth of physical devices in the environment, find the information we need (when we need it, without forcing our eyes to examine thousands of search-engine hits), and enable us to work together with other people through space and time.
Oxygen device technologies
Devices in Oxygen supply power for computation, communication, and perception in much the same way that batteries and wall outlets supply power for electrical appliances. Both mobile and stationary devices are universal communication and computation appliances. They are also anonymous: they do not store configurations that are customized to any particular user. As for batteries and power outlets, the primary difference between them lies in the amount of energy they supply.
Collections of embedded devices, called E21s, create intelligent spaces inside offices, buildings, homes, and vehicles. E21s provide large amounts of embedded computation, as well as interfaces to camera and microphone arrays, large area displays, and other devices. Users communicate naturally in the spaces created by the E21s, using speech and vision, without being aware of any particular point of interaction.
Networks, called N21s, connect dynamically changing configurations of self-identifying mobile and stationary devices to form collaborative regions. N21s support multiple communication protocols for low-power point-to-point, building-wide, and campus-wide communication. N21s also provide completely decentralized mechanisms for naming, location and resource discovery, and secure information access.
The Oxygen software environment is built to support change, which is inevitable if Oxygen is to provide a system that is adaptable, let alone eternal. Change is occasioned by anonymous devices customizing to users, by explicit user requests, by the needs of applications and their components, by current operating conditions, by the availability of new software and upgrades, by failures, or by any number of other causes. Oxygen's software architecture relies on control and planning abstractions that provide mechanisms for change, on specifications that support putting these mechanisms to use, and on persistent object stores with transactional semantics to provide operational support for change.
Speech and vision, rather than keyboards and mice, provide the main modes of interaction in Oxygen. Multimodal integration increases the effectiveness of these perceptual technologies, for example, by using vision to augment speech understanding by recognizing facial expressions, lip movement, and gaze. Perceptual technologies are part of the core of Oxygen, not just afterthoughts or interfaces to separate applications. Oxygen applications can tailor "lite" versions of these technologies quickly to make human-machine interaction easy and natural. Graceful interdomain context switching supports seamless integration of applications.
Oxygen user technologies
Several user technologies harness Oxygen's massive computational, communication, and perceptual resources. They both exploit the capacity of Oxygen's system technologies for change in support of users, and they help provide Oxygen's system technologies with that capacity. Oxygen user technologies include:
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