Mark Weiser had a vision. That computers would be made invisible and permeated in our environment, so that computers would serve us and adapt towards our life and make our lives easier. He called this ubiquitous computing. It was a tall order, but many in the academia and industry are working to achieve his vision including myself.
However, many of the things that Weiser envisioned have not come true yet and still remains a vision. People think of ubiquitous computing as this "Star Trek" world or a future like the movie Minority Report. In the early '80s, Japan had the TRON initiative, an open computing and communications intiative. Now, that has evolved into T-Engine and this article from IEEE Pervasive Computing shows that T-Engine is ready as a ubicomp technology for prime time, for practical use.
Japan has always been the leader and advocate for advanced technology, you can witness this with their R&D labs with innovations by Sony, NTT DoCoMo and others. When will ubiquitous computing truly arrive here in Canada and the US? What are some issues that remain to be solved before the vision of ubiquitous computing becomes a reality?
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