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PARC, known as one of the most innovative commercial research labs in the world, was once the in-house lab for Xerox and is known for developing such technologies as laser printing and the Ethernet. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox that discovers and implements breakthroughs for commercial and government clients.
Linda Jacobson manages communications and marketing at Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (PARC). Before joining PARC in 2006, she cofounded and ran an interactive visualization production studio; served as virtual reality evangelist at Silicon Graphics; wrote books and articles on technology and business; and cofounded several magazines, including Wired.
Bo Begole, an applied computer science researcher who invents technologies for novel user-level applications, manages the PARC Ubiquitous Computing Research Area. Bo holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech.Kurt Partridge is a researcher in the Ubiquitous Computing Area at PARC. His research spans a variety of areas, including context awareness, activity modeling, location modeling, mobile device interaction and wearable computing. He is particularly interested in systems and devices that blend naturally with people's everyday activities.
Business will soon need to stop thinking of cell phones as phones, GPS devices as providers of directions, and cameras as cameras. And they'll have to stop thinking that way long before consumers do. Welcome to the age of "ubiquitous computing," when all those devices will not only work together -- without a person necessarily aware of the interactions -- but also interpret a person's behavior and even their intent so that businesses can provide them with relevant information or services.
"Intent-aware technologies have broad implications for the future of how businesses relate to consumers. How do people behave and use a company's products? What are the best ways for making recommendations or prompting a person to take action?" says the technology research company Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (PARC). "Having that class of information has great power for any organization -- and acting on it could fundamentally alter the customer-vendor relationship, as well as an organization's operations." Imagine, for example, someone walking down a store aisle and stopping to look at a toaster. Sensors notice the activity, and based on its interpretation of the behavior, can provide information about the toaster -- price, features and colors.
In a white paper entitled Creating New Business Opportunities Through Ubiquitous Computing, PARC runs down and addresses the various social and technological barriers to harnessing the powers of ubiquitous computing, the security concerns, and the various commercial "sweet spots" that will provide new opportunities to different business sectors. The following excerpts of the paper concentrate on real-life examples of how ubiquitous computing can transform every day experiences, such as shopping.
Take, for instance, the "Responsive Mirror" that PARC developed. Using video and image display technology, a person can try on different clothes in a dressing room and compare how they look. "Watching his reflection in an apparently conventional mirror, a shopper may directly compare a garment he's trying on adjacent to an image display of photos of himself wearing the garments he previously tried on. In both his live reflection and the photographs of his previous outfits, his physical poses match." The system even makes use of social networks, allowing the shopper to make live comparisons of fashions popular with friends.
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