GENEVIEVE BELL HAS spent the past few months travelling to several different countries, rummaging in people’s cars, and photographing and logging what she found in them. Ms Bell is neither a private investigator nor a spy. Instead she works for Intel, the world’s biggest maker of semiconductors, where she runs a team that helps the company analyse how people interact with technology.
An anthropologist by training, Ms Bell says her interest in cars and their contents—which were unpacked with their owners’ permission—is a reflection of the fact that vehicles have become places where people use a great deal of personal gadgetry. Her photos often reveal what she calls “a wasteland of electrical detritus” inside vehicles: everything from multiple chargers for different kinds of electronic devices to music CDs and other artefacts of people’s digital lives. “Cars are a perfect proxy for mobile phones,” she says, “because people load lots of stuff into them to be prepared for every eventuality and then rarely chuck anything out.”
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Intel’s curiosity about how people use technology in cars is hardly surprising. Carmakers are keen to install extra computing power in their vehicles in order to impress customers with a taste for technology, and Intel hopes that this will translate into a big new market for its chips. Ford, for instance, has already developed a service called SYNC, based on a Microsoft operating system. SYNC allows drivers to make calls, play music and do other things using voice commands. the car company has also created AppLink, a feature that lets people link their smartphones to a vehicle’s voice-control system and operate their apps with it. For now the system works with only a handful of apps, such as Pandora, an internet-radio service, but Ford is hoping to expand that number rapidly.
It is not just vehicles that are becoming more connected. So are homes, public places like sports stadiums and even aircraft
Japan’s Toyota has also been working on an in-car system, called Entune, to which drivers will be able to connect their smartphones via Bluetooth wireless links and other means. And it plans to make driving even more personal by helping people’s cars “talk” to them. the firm has announced plans for a Twitter-like private social network, called Toyota Friend, which will be integrated into some electric and hybrid vehicles in Japan next year. Based on software from Salesforce.com and Microsoft, this will enable a car to send a tweet-like message to its owner telling him that, say, its battery is running low or a maintenance check is due. Mr Benioff, Salesforce.com’s boss, says he foresees many more “product social networks” that will create more intimate relationships between people and the devices they own.
It is not just vehicles that are becoming more connected. So are homes, public places like sports stadiums and even aircraft, where passengers are now sometimes offered in-flight Wi-Fi services for an extra charge. Cisco, a big IT firm, reckons that there could be almost 15 billion devices linked to the internet in circulation by 2015, up from 7.5 billion last year. These will include everything from televisions and gaming consoles (see chart 3) to coffee machines and cookers.
This has led researchers such as Ms Bell to conclude that ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp” to its fans, is no longer the realm of science fiction. in a series of articles in the 1990s Mark Weiser, the chief technologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be everywhere yet all but invisible. Instead of the conventional desktop or laptop, Mr Weiser (who died in 1999) and one of his colleagues, John Seely Brown, predicted that in this new era of “calm technology” gadgets would adapt to people rather than vice versa.
Still a wired world
“Calm” is not a word typically associated with most personal technology today. Just trying to get various gadgets to work together is often enough to send blood pressures soaring. Moreover, the spaghetti of wires, the chargers and the other paraphernalia of digital life are hardly unobtrusive. And although wireless broadband connectivity is widespread, it can still be patchy and unreliable. All this is a far cry from the kind of seamless interaction between humans and connected devices depicted in futuristic films beloved of ubicomp enthusiasts, such as Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”.
Ms Bell acknowledges that the infrastructure of computing is still “messy”, but argues this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it has become much more widely accessible. Bo Begole, a ubicomp expert at Xerox PARC, echoes that view. “We already have a critical mass of devices and wireless networks,” he explains. “The next step is to make those devices aware of how humans work and to get them to adapt to their habits.”
If there is one part of the world where personal technology is on its way towards becoming ubiquitous it is Asia, where several richer countries have created impressive infrastructures on which all sorts of personal technologies can work. South Korea, for instance, plans that every home in the country should have an internet connection with a speed of up to one gigabit per second (fast enough to download a full-length feature film in a matter of seconds). And it also intends greatly to increase the capacity of the country’s wireless-broadband networks.
Singapore has set itself a goal of creating an ultra-fast broadband infrastructure and sees this as the foundation of a wealth of new digital services that will be delivered to its citizens. These include “telemedicine”, which allows doctors to monitor people’s health remotely using devices in patients’ homes, and high-definition videoconferencing services so that Singaporeans can keep in touch with relatives, friends and colleagues. Canalys, a research firm, reckons that almost two-thirds of the phones sold in Singapore last year were smartphones. the same gadgets are also plentiful in Japan, where many of them contain near-field communication (NFC) chips, which in effect turn them into mobile wallets that can be used to pay for groceries, trips on public transport and more.
America, Britain and other countries are also experimenting with various mobile-payment technologies, including NFC-enabled phones. Fans of these envisage a future in which people’s wallets and purses will get sucked into smartphones too. Google, for instance, has already endorsed NFC technology and Apple is likely to include some form of mobile-payment capability in future versions of its iPhone.
A new reality show
Other novel services are giving people far more data about the world around them. there is much excitement in tech circles about augmented-reality apps. the Golfscape GPS Rangefinder allows golfers to see a picture of the course in front of them and have it overlaid with useful data, such as the distance to various bunkers and the green. Other apps, for example Layar and Google Goggles, combine visual images with data gleaned from web browsers and other software. This enables them to overlay the images with information from many different sources. Someone using Layar can point his phone’s camera at a street in Paris and see information about, say, well-known restaurants in it and call up pictures showing what they looked like in the past.
The ability to capture video and audio easily on smartphones has also given a boost to fans of “lifelogging”—recording your life via electronic media—which was popularised by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, two Microsoft executives, in “Your Life, Uploaded”. For some time people have been immortalising their thoughts and deeds on Facebook and other social networks from PCs. More and more often, they are doing so on the move, from smartphones with apps such as Instagram. a photograph is taken, the time and place are noted automatically, and with a few taps the image can be uploaded. “More of people’s lives will be captured in future,” says Mr Bell, “simply because more bits and bytes are flowing out of these devices.”
In their book Messrs Bell and Gemmell predict that people with chronic ailments will one day have sensors embedded directly in their bodies that can transmit data about their vital signs wirelessly to other devices such as their phones. This forecast, which would give a new spin to the slogan “Intel Inside”, may seem far-fetched, yet some cardiac devices are already equipped with wireless connectivity that allows them to send data to doctors. And gadgets such as a bathroom scale made by Withings, a French company, can transmit a person’s weight to a digital health-log on a computer or smartphone.
Rather than have sensors lodged inside their bodies, many people may prefer to have them woven into their clothing, or placed next to rather than under their skin. some venture capitalists such as Mr Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz believe that “wearable computing” will be the next big thing in personal technology, though the companies that have set their sights on this area face a difficult task. History is littered with examples, such as the Seiko Ruputer wristwatch computer, that sounded great in theory but turned out to be lemons in practice.
This has not dissuaded Nike, which has produced a range of wearable devices that allow people to track their fitness as they exercise. nor has it put off Jawbone, which has won a reputation for itself by making Bluetooth-equipped headsets and smart, portable speakers. the company has created a slim bracelet, the UP band, that contains a wealth of sensors and a rechargeable battery all attached to a flexible steel frame enclosed in a special, rubber-like coating. among other things, the band can record how much distance the wearer has covered in a day and how many calories he has burned, and can even monitor his sleep patterns. Data from the device can be uploaded to an app on a smartphone and then shared with the wearer’s friends on various social networks.
Dressed in devices
Hosain Rahman, Jawbone’s boss, foresees many more devices like the UP band creating what he calls “everywhere computing”, with microprocessors and sensors embedded in all sorts of things, from shirts to jewellery, and linked by a “body-area network”. Other companies such as Looxcie, which makes cheap, wearable video cameras, are also hoping to profit from a more transparent world.
These devices may remain minority tastes for a while, if they ever catch on at all. but smartphones, tablets and other mobile digital devices are likely to keep the consumer-electronics industry busy for some time to come. the ability of these gadgets to deliver the mobile internet to millions—and ultimately billions—of people is going to have a profound impact on the world. “We’re really at a very nascent stage of this revolution,” says Vijay Gurbaxani, a professor of information systems at the University of California, Irvine. Mr Gurbaxani is right, but some of its implications are already becoming clear.