The other day I started writing a snotty piece about the difficulties of networked or, as it is sometimes called, ubiquitous computing. Then I hit a question I couldn’t answer.
It all began well enough. There was a short entry in Matt Jones’s blog, which took me to Gene Becker’s thoughtful reflections on the collapse of technologies at Prada’s New York Epicentre store and his thoughts about what he call ubicomp.
Reading it I was reminded of a story in Michael Lewis‘s “The New, New Thing”. In it he describes the maiden voyage of Jim Clark‘s yacht, Hyperion– a heavily computer controlled boat. The bit that had amused me and I had thought a salutary lesson was the story of how an automated partition in the galley had unexpected risen and then fallen, without any of the programmers being able to work out why it had occurred.
There were also some more serious, in the sense of life threatening, incidents with the boat’s engine, that were finally resolved by ripping off its sensors.
All of which seemed to support my prejudices about the difficulties of networking to real world objects and Gene Becker’s conclusions:
“Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context, and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high. I used to say ubicomp was a ten-year problem; now I’m starting to think that it’s really a hundred-year problem.”
But, I had a nagging thought at the back of mind. Lewis’s story was about a maiden voyage. The reason the programmers were on board was because they were still working on the system. In these circumstances glitches were inevitable. I needed to find out what happened later on and that has proved difficult.
What does seem to be the case is that Hyperion works. It won the Millennium Cup races in New Zealand a couple of years after its maiden voyage. The question that this raises is how does it work? Did they sort out all the problems or did they scale down the level of ambition? Is it a boat that can be sailed at distance with no one on board as originally intended? Or, is it just a well designed yacht with some computer aided bits? I don’t know. If I did it might help answer the question of whether ubicomp is a ten year or hundred year problem. At the moment my money is still on Gene Becker being right.