physical world meant deploying and placing
a highly engineered collection of instruments
to obtain particular inputs and
reporting the data over specialized wired
control protocols to data acquisition computers.
Ubiquitous computing testbeds
have retained much of this engineered data
acquisition style, although we use them to
observe a variety of unstructured phenomena
(such as human gestures and interaction).
The opportunity ahead lies in the
ability to easily deploy flexible sensing,
computation, and actuation capabilities
into our physical environments such that
the devices themselves are general-purpose
and can organize and adapt to support several
application types.1
In this article, we describe the challenges
on the road ahead, present a taxonomy of
system types that we expect to emerge during
this next decade of research and development,
and summarize technological
developments.