In the film, Tom Cruise lives in a futuristic world that seems to respond to his every move. As a police detective examining video evidence for clues to crimes that have not happened yet, Cruise is like a symphony conductor, waving his arms to signal the computer to fast forward, rewind, freeze, and zoom in on various segments of digital video.

When he arrives home at his apartment, he says, "I'm home," and the space comes alive. Lights flip on, and music starts up on the stereo.

Though Cruise's cinematic adventure is set fifty years from now, MIT researchers at the second annual meeting of the MIT Oxygen Alliance, held June 12th and 13th, demonstrated the technology advances meant to guide this vision into reality.

"The goal is to have technology interact as close to the person as we can get it," Ken Steele, a research scientist with MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), told Wireless NewsFactor. "We basically want to give everyone a personal secretary or assistant, including the secretaries and assistants."

Smart Environments

In Steele's future -- one that may be less than 50 years distant -- speech and vision technologies will let humans communicate naturally with computers, just as they would with other people. Decentralized networks and robust software/hardware architectures would adapt to mobile users, currently available resources, or varying operating conditions.

A person living in this future will be able to tell the computer -- tell it, not type instructions -- to book a flight to London on a certain date, and the computer will take care of it, knowing already about preferences in seat assignments and meal choices, and working within personal preferences as to the price, number of stopovers and landing times.

While people on the move and outdoors would still use cell phones and PDAs to interact with increasingly intelligent and adaptable technology, Steel said the project also envisions fully integrated smart environments in which the user requires no device in hand to interact.

"There are people here trying to say, 'nothing we can lose,'" he said. "They don't want users to have to carry anything."

See Now, Buy Later

New technologies demonstrated at the recent Project Oxygen meeting include a multilingual conversation system that can recognize, understand and respond to naturally spoken requests. The system can be configured to handle complex dialogues at a rapid pace, allowing users to obtain such information as the weather in Tokyo or traffic conditions in Boston. (continued...)

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