Achieving Ubiquity: The New Third Wave

In this article, Chris Harrison, Jason Wiese, and Anind K. Dey discuss the predictions of Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing, who envisioned that we would have smart personal environments, with numerous computational devices embedded within each environment. The authors point out that, rather than this happening, what we have currently are personalized computational devices, for example, smart phones, tied to users rather than embedded in the environment. The interesting development of this observation is the crux of their article. Even though multimedia, per se, is not specifically addressed in the article, what the authors have to say is certainly relevant to our community, as smart computational devices and sensors of various sorts are certainly siblings under the skin.-William I. Grosky