Toggle search
Toggle menu
5.4K
6.1K
229
52.6K
VR & AR Wiki
Toggle preferences menu
Toggle personal menu
Not logged in
Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits.

Ubiquitous computing

vrarwiki.com · VR & AR Wiki
More actions

Ubiquitous computing (often shortened to ubicomp, and also called pervasive computing) is a model of computing in which many computers are spread through the physical environment and woven into everyday objects and activities, so that people use them without focusing on them as computers. Mark Weiser first articulated the idea in its current form in 1988 at the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC,[1] and in a 1993 paper he described it as "the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user".[2] His 1991 Scientific American article "The Computer for the 21st Century" introduced the idea to a general audience with the sentence "The most profound technologies are those that disappear."[3]

The concept matters to VR and AR in two opposite ways. Weiser defined ubiquitous computing against virtual reality, which he called the notion "most diametrically opposed" to his vision because it "attempts to make a world inside the computer".[3] Augmented reality, by contrast, grew up alongside ubicomp as another way of bringing computation into the real world: the same 1993 journal issue that carried Weiser's paper also carried a paper titled "Knowledge-based augmented reality", and later research programs described AR as a user interface for ubiquitous and pervasive computing.[4][5]

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every quotation, date, specification and attribution against the cited texts: Weiser's 1991 and 1993 papers, his archived PARC pages and calm technology essay, the Stanford finding aid, the ParcTab and Satyanarayanan papers, the UbiComp steering committee, FWF, KARMA, NaviCam and Grubert pages, plus Crossref and OpenAlex records for the other papers. About review dates.

Definition

The ubiquitous computing page on Weiser's PARC website described it as "the third wave in computing": first mainframes, each shared by many people, then the personal computing era, and next ubiquitous computing, "when technology recedes into the background of our lives".[1] The same page quoted his own early summary of the program: "Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized)."[1]

Weiser separated the idea from portable computing. In the 1991 article he wrote that ubiquitous computing "does not just mean computers that can be carried to the beach, jungle or airport", because even a powerful notebook computer "still focuses attention on a single box"; he also rejected the label "multimedia computers" for the same reason.[3] The PARC page stated that ubicomp helped start the boom in mobile computing research "although it is not the same thing as mobile computing, nor a superset nor a subset".[1] Weiser named two issues of "crucial importance": location and scale. A computer that merely knows what room it is in "can adapt its behavior in significant ways without requiring even a hint of artificial intelligence", and computers would come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task.[3]

In 2001 Mahadev Satyanarayanan of Carnegie Mellon University described Weiser's vision as "ubiquitous computing, now also called pervasive computing", and summarized its essence as "the creation of environments saturated with computing and communication capability, yet gracefully integrated with human users". He placed pervasive computing as the next step after distributed systems and mobile computing, and named four research thrusts: effective use of smart spaces, invisibility, localized scalability and masking uneven conditioning.[6]

History

Origins at Xerox PARC

Weiser joined Xerox PARC in May 1987. He headed its Computer Science Laboratory from November 1988 to December 1994 and was Chief Technologist in 1999, the year he died. Stanford University Libraries' finding aid for his papers states that his work from 1988 focused on ubiquitous computing, "a program he initiated that envisions PC's being replaced with invisible computers embedded in everyday objects".[7] In the 1993 paper Weiser wrote that the idea "first arose from contemplating the place of today's computer in actual activities of everyday life", drawing on anthropological studies of work, and that the research method was to build working prototypes in enough quantity to use them every day, "using ourselves and a few colleagues as guinea pigs".[2]

The first hardware took the form of "tabs", "pads" and "boards", built at PARC between 1988 and 1994.[1] Weiser's 1991 article described them as inch-scale machines that "approximate active Post-It notes", foot-scale machines that behave "something like a sheet of paper", and yard-scale displays equivalent to a blackboard or bulletin board. Counting the labels, notes and papers in an ordinary room, he estimated that a room might hold "more than a hundred tabs, ten or twenty pads, and one or two boards", which led to the group's initial goal of "hundreds of computers per room".[3]

PARC ubiquitous computing device classes
Class Scale PARC prototype Details reported in the sources
Tab Inch-scale ParcTab 6.2 cm x 4.5 cm (2.4 in x 1.8 in) touch-sensitive LCD with 128 x 64 monochrome pixels; three buttons under the fingers of the holding hand; 880 nm infrared networking at 9600 and 19200 baud through infrared cells defined by rooms, so the system knew which room's transceiver received each tab's signals[8]
Pad Foot-scale Prototype pad built by Bob Krivacic Two microprocessors, a workstation-sized display, a multi-button stylus and a radio network; intended as "scrap computers" that can be picked up and used anywhere[3]
Board Yard-scale Liveboard Boards built by Richard Bruce and Scott Elrod measured about 40 by 60 inches and showed 1024x768 black-and-white pixels in 1991, operated with wireless electronic "chalk"; Weiser later called the Liveboard the first ubiquitous computing technology to be deployed and noted that it had become a Xerox product[3][2][9]

The ParcTab project set out to test the system in an office community of about 41 people who acted as both users and developers of mobile applications. Its authors described ubiquitous computing as a philosophy that emphasizes "context sensitivity, casual interaction and the spatial arrangement of computers".[8] Weiser's 1991 article also credited Olivetti Cambridge Research Labs with pioneering active badges, clip-on devices about the size of an employee ID card that identify themselves to receivers placed around a building.[3] The Olivetti team's 1992 paper on the Active Badge location system described staff badges that transmit signals to a network of sensors, and also addressed the privacy concerns that location systems raise.[10] ParcTab researchers Bill Schilit, Norman Adams and Roy Want published "Context-Aware Computing Applications" in 1994, which defined context-aware computing and described applications, prototyped on the ParcTab, that "examine and react to an individual's changing context".[11]

Calm technology

Weiser and John Seely Brown extended the idea in an essay titled "Designing Calm Technology", dated 21 December 1995. They argued that "calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two", where the periphery is "what we are attuned to without attending to explicitly". Their opening example was the "Dangling String" by artist Natalie Jeremijenko: an 8 foot piece of plastic hanging from a small motor in the ceiling that twitches with each bit of traffic on a nearby Ethernet cable, so that network load can be sensed from nearby offices without looking at a screen.[12] The ubiquitous computing page on Weiser's PARC website used "the age of calm technology" as another name for the ubiquitous computing era.[1]

Pervasive computing and the research field

By 2001 Satyanarayanan could point to pervasive computing projects at several universities, including Project Aura at Carnegie Mellon, Endeavour at UC Berkeley and Oxygen at MIT, and in industry at AT&T Research in Cambridge, UK and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He noted that the hardware for Weiser's vision "simply did not exist" in 1991, and that handheld and wearable computers, wireless LANs and devices to sense and control appliances had since become commercial products.[6] The first issue of the magazine IEEE Pervasive Computing appeared in January 2002 under the theme "Reaching for Weiser's Vision"; Satyanarayanan's opening editorial dedicated the issue to Weiser, and the print edition reprinted his 1991 article.[13]

The ACM UbiComp conference (the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing) grew out of two series. The Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (HUC) conference was first held in Karlsruhe in 1999 and became the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in 2001; a separate Pervasive Computing conference series began in Zurich in 2002. The two series merged in 2013. Since 2017 the conference's paper tracks have drawn on the journal is Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), and the conference is held jointly with the ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC).[14]

In a 2000 review of the first decade of application research, Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt identified three interaction themes in ubicomp work: natural interfaces, context-aware applications, and automated capture and access. They proposed "everyday computing", focused on continuous interaction over time, as a further area.[15]

Relationship to virtual reality

Weiser set ubiquitous computing up as a counterpoint to virtual reality. In the 1991 article he described VR users who "don special goggles that project an artificial scene on their eyes" and wear gloves or body suits that sense their motions. He granted that VR "may have its purpose in allowing people to explore realms otherwise inaccessible", such as the insides of cells or the surfaces of distant planets, but called it "only a map, not a territory" and wrote that it "focuses an enormous apparatus on simulating the world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world that already exists". Because the opposition was "so strong", some of the PARC group used the term "embodied virtuality" for drawing computers out of their electronic shells and into the physical world.[3]

The ubiquitous computing page on his PARC website put it more briefly: "Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people." The page added that VR "is primarily a horse power problem", while ubicomp is "a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences".[1]

The 1993 paper gave a more nuanced account. Weiser wrote that in 1988, when he started the PARC program, VR "came the closest to enacting the principles we believed important", because in its ultimate form it makes the computer effectively invisible by taking over the human senses. He called VR "extremely useful in scientific visualization and entertainment" but listed two flaws as a general tool: it could not then produce a convincing simulation at reasonable cost, and "most importantly, it has the goal of fooling the user", leaving the everyday physical world behind.[2]

Relationship to augmented reality

Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality developed in close contact in the early 1990s. The July 1993 issue of Communications of the ACM, which included an introduction by Pierre Wellner, Wendy Mackay and Rich Gold titled "Back to the real world", carried both Weiser's ubicomp paper and "Knowledge-based augmented reality" by Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and Dorée Seligmann.[16][4] The Columbia project page for that work, KARMA (Knowledge-based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance), describes a prototype that used a see-through head-mounted display and Logitech 3D trackers attached to a laser printer to explain simple end-user maintenance with overlaid graphics.[17] The same year, the SIGGRAPH 93 conference included a panel titled "Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality"; the MIT Media Lab's publication record lists R. Gold, Bill Buxton, Steve Feiner, Chris Schmandt, Pierre Wellner and Mark Weiser as its authors.[18][19]

At Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Jun Rekimoto and Katashi Nagao presented NaviCam at the UIST '95 symposium. The handheld device recognized color-code IDs placed in the environment and superimposed situation-sensitive messages on a video see-through screen. The authors argued that combining ID-awareness with a portable video see-through display "solves several problems with current ubiquitous computers systems and augmented reality systems".[20] Rekimoto's project page describes the underlying "Augmented Interaction" style as one that "tries to make computers as transparent as possible", with the user's focus "not on the computer, but the real world".[21]

Wearable computing took a different route to the same goal, carrying the computer on the body instead of placing it in the room. A 1997 paper by Thad Starner, Steve Mann and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab described a community of wearable-computer users exploring "the augmented realities that these systems can provide", including camera-based tracking to overlay graphics on the real world and infrared beacons for sensing location.[22] At the third International Symposium on Wearable Computers in 1999, B. J. Rhodes, N. Minar and J. Weaver compared the two paradigms for context-aware applications: in their analysis, room-based ubiquitous systems struggled with privacy and personalization, while wearable systems struggled with localized information and shared resources, so they proposed a peer-to-peer network combining both.[23]

In Austria, Dieter Schmalstieg led the Austrian Science Fund START project "Augmented Reality for Pervasive Computing" from September 2002 to August 2009, with funding of EUR 1,200,000. The project's thesis was that AR "allows to integrate the whole world into the interface - the world essentially becomes the interface", and it set out to extend the Studierstube AR platform into a pervasive computing environment, including a wearable AR system.[5] Schmalstieg and Gerhard Reitmayr later published a book chapter titled "The World as a User Interface: Augmented Reality for Ubiquitous Computing".[24]

A 2017 survey by Jens Grubert, Tobias Langlotz, Stefanie Zollmann and Holger Regenbrecht in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics proposed "Pervasive Augmented Reality": a continuous, multi-purpose AR experience that senses the user's context and adapts to it, as opposed to AR applications used sporadically for a single task. The paper draws on context-awareness research from fields including ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and names head-mounted displays with integrated processing, such as Epson's optical see-through displays and Microsoft HoloLens, as consumer hardware designed for AR interfaces.[25]

Privacy

Weiser identified privacy as a central problem in his 1991 article, where he called it "perhaps key" among the social issues of embodied virtuality and warned that "hundreds of computers in every room, all capable of sensing people near them and linked by high-speed networks, have the potential to make totalitarianism up to now seem like sheerest anarchy".[3] The Active Badge paper addressed the privacy concerns raised by location systems, and Satyanarayanan wrote that privacy, "already a thorny problem in distributed systems and mobile computing, is greatly complicated by pervasive computing".[10][6] Abowd and Mynatt listed privacy, security, visibility and control among the lessons of the field's first decade.[15] Similar questions about always-on sensing now apply to AR glasses and headsets; see Privacy in virtual and augmented reality.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 "Ubiquitous Computing". Xerox PARC (Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing pages, archived by the Internet Archive on 4 June 2018). 1996-03-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20180604013008/http://www.ubiq.com:80/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Mark Weiser (1993-07). "Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing". Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 75-84 (author's text dated 23 March 1993, hosted by Stanford University). doi:10.1145/159544.159617. https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs428-03-spring/Papers/readings/General/Weiser_Ubi_CACM93.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 Mark Weiser (1991-09). "The Computer for the 21st Century". Scientific American, vol. 265, no. 3, pp. 94-104 (author's pre-publication text, hosted by Stanford University). doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94. https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs428-03-spring/Papers/readings/General/Weiser_SciAm91.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre, Dorée Seligmann (1993-07). "Knowledge-based augmented reality". Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 53-62. https://doi.org/10.1145/159544.159587. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Augmented Reality for Pervasive Computing (project Y193)". Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Research Radar. Austrian Science Fund. https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/research-radar/10.55776/Y193. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 M. Satyanarayanan (2001). "Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges". IEEE Personal Communications, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 10-17. doi:10.1109/98.943998. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aura/docdir/pcs01.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  7. ↑ "Weiser (Mark D.) papers, 1969-1999". Online Archive of California. Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford Libraries. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf700005jw/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Roy Want, Bill N. Schilit, Norman I. Adams, Rich Gold, Karin Petersen, David Goldberg, John R. Ellis, Mark Weiser (1995). "An Overview of the ParcTab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment". IEEE Personal Communications, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 28-43. doi:10.1109/98.475986. https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~rhan/CSCI_7143_Fall_2007/Papers/Want95long_PARCTab.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  9. ↑ Scott Elrod, Ken Pier, John Tang, Brent Welch, Richard Bruce, Rich Gold, et al. (1992). "Liveboard". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '92), pp. 599-607. https://doi.org/10.1145/142750.143052. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcão, Jonathan Gibbons (1992). "The active badge location system". ACM Transactions on Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 91-102. https://doi.org/10.1145/128756.128759. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  11. ↑ Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Roy Want (1994-12). "Context-Aware Computing Applications". 1994 First Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 85-90. https://doi.org/10.1109/WMCSA.1994.16. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  12. ↑ Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown (1995-12-21). "Designing Calm Technology". Xerox PARC, archived by the Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20180604010109/http://www.ubiq.com:80/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  13. ↑ M. Satyanarayanan (2002-01). "A catalyst for mobile and ubiquitous computing". IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 2-5. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2002.993138. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  14. ↑ "UbiComp Steering Committee". UbiComp. UbiComp Steering Committee. https://ubicomp.org/sc/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Gregory D. Abowd, Elizabeth D. Mynatt (2000-03). "Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing". ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 29-58. https://doi.org/10.1145/344949.344988. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  16. ↑ Pierre Wellner, Wendy Mackay, Rich Gold (1993-07). "Back to the real world". Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 24-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/159544.159555. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  17. ↑ Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre, Dorée Seligmann. "KARMA: Knowledge-based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance". Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab. https://graphics.cs.columbia.edu/projects/karma/karma.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  18. ↑ Rich Gold (1993-09). "Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality". Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '93), pp. 393-394. https://doi.org/10.1145/166117.166173. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  19. ↑ "Ubiquitous Computing and Augmented Reality". MIT Media Lab. 1993-08-02. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/ubiquitous-computing-and-augmented-reality/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  20. ↑ Jun Rekimoto, Katashi Nagao (1995). "The World through the Computer: Computer Augmented Interaction with Real World Environments". UIST '95 (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology), pp. 29-36. doi:10.1145/215585.215639. https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Masters/Ian/UIST95/abstracts/Rekimoto.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  21. ↑ Jun Rekimoto. "Augmented Interaction: The World Through the Computer". Sony Computer Science Laboratories. https://www2.sonycsl.co.jp/person/rekimoto/navi.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  22. ↑ Thad Starner, Steve Mann, Bradley Rhodes, Jeffrey Levine, Jennifer Healey, Dana Kirsch, Rosalind W. Picard, Alex Pentland (1997-08). "Augmented Reality through Wearable Computing". Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 386-398. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.1997.6.4.386. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  23. ↑ B. J. Rhodes, N. Minar, J. Weaver (1999-10). "Wearable computing meets ubiquitous computing: reaping the best of both worlds". Digest of Papers, Third International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '99), pp. 141-149. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISWC.1999.806695. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  24. ↑ Dieter Schmalstieg, Gerhard Reitmayr (2007). "The World as a User Interface: Augmented Reality for Ubiquitous Computing". Location Based Services and TeleCartography, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, pp. 369-391. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-36728-4_28. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  25. ↑ Jens Grubert, Tobias Langlotz, Stefanie Zollmann, Holger Regenbrecht (2017). "Towards Pervasive Augmented Reality: Context-Awareness in Augmented Reality". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1706-1724. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2016.2543720. https://hci.otago.ac.nz/papers/GrubertIEEETVCG2016.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Retrieved from "https://vrarwiki.com/index.php?title=Ubiquitous_computing&oldid=52083"