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Project Oxygen: never mind the robots, think wireless

"If I pick up your cell phone today and make a call, it charges you, not me ... " - an excellent vision of "pervasive computing" in the future, in Tech Review.

The director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rodney Brooks, appears, at first, to be talking about robots. But ignore the bots; persist with his interview in MIT Enterprise Tech Review, where he explains Project Oxygen - his pervasive computing vision.

"With Project Oxygen, we're mostly concentrating on getting pervasive computing working in an office environment," Brooks explains.

"But the different companies investing in Project Oxygen obviously have different takes on it. Philips is much more interested in technologies to make information services more available within the home. Delta Electronics is interested in the future of large-screen displays—things that can be done if you have wall-sized displays you can sell to homeowners. Nokia is interested in selling information services. They call a cell phone a "terminal." They want to deliver stuff to this terminal and find ways we can interact with this terminal."

Prototype devices described in this interview include hand-held "intelligences" called H21s.

Roberts explains: "The idea is that we should have all our information services always available, no matter what we are doing, and as unobtrusive as possible. If I pick up your cell phone today and make a call, it charges you, not me. With our prototype H21s, when you pick one up and use it, it recognizes your face and customizes itself to you."

It's a device which knows your schedule and where you want to be. "You can talk to it, ask it for directions or make calls from it. It provides you access to the Web under voice or stylus command. And it can answer your questions, rather than just giving you Web pages that you have to crawl through," Roberts explains.

Oh, and if you must read about robots, it's got lots about them. Including the little sneaky fact that Dyson, in the UK, is about to launch a house-cleaning robot ...