TECHNOLOGY: Is It Time to Get Smarter?

Imagine being able to participate in a teleconference when on the move in a

building, with the video coming up on wall-mounted displays or on personal

digital assistants. That is the kind of technology taking its final contours at

research centers in the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign…a

technology which can help build smart-homes, smart-offices, smart-classrooms and

smart-transport. Prof Roy H Campbell, spearheading project ‘GAIA: Enabling

Active Spaces’, talked to Cyber News Service.

What is the GAIA project?

In Greek mythology, Gaia represents the earth goddess. The GAIA project

integrates physical spaces such as a room or a car with information spaces to

form a distributed computing system, comprising of communicating computing

devices. In other words, what it tries to achieve is a direct relationship

between the real view of the world and the computer view of the world.

How does it work?

GAIA integrates embedded processors in physical spaces into a model of

computing called ‘active space’, which is coupled to mobile users and

portable computers. The wireless smart devices sense what is happening and

react. Applications are carried out using input devices such as mouse, pen or

fingers and output devices such as monitors, PDAs or speakers.

How far is it from implementation?

Some of the things we said have actually been tested and found functional. We

can walk into a room and browse it electronically. We can chat with somebody

without knowing which device is helping us. Experiments with video streams have

also been successful.

What could be its applications?

GAIA has applications in business, science and education. It has vast scope

in the automobile industry where integration of embedded devices has already

been achieved. It could find application in supermarkets and help out acedemics

and businessmen.

Priya K Mathew



Cyber News Service, Chennai