Intelligent Spaces

Book excerpt: This book sets out a vision ofpervasive IT through intelligent spaces and describes some ofthe progress that has been made towards its realisation. The context for intelligent spaces (or iSpaces) is the world where information and communication technology (lCT) disappears as it becomes embedded into physical objects and the spaces in which we live and work. The ultimate vision is that this embedded technology provides us with intelligent and contextually relevant support, augmenting our lives and our experience of the physical world in a benign and non intrusive manner. The enormous advances in hardware, system design, and software that are being achieved enable. this vision. In particular, the performance advances and cost reductions in hardware components - processors, memory, storage, and communications - are making it possible to embed intelligence and communications ability into lower cost objects. The Internet is a living experiment in building complex, distributed systems on a global scale. In software, there have been solid advances in creating systems that can deal with complexities on the scale required to interact with human activity, in limited domains at least. The ultimate vision is challenging, and there are many obstacles to its realisation.