Team Ether

Web Sites Reviewed

Computers are getting faster, smaller, more effecient, and cheaper which will result in computers in everything (ubiquitous). This is already happening, and as it grows computers will become invisible, embedded in everything, and connected together. They will also become intellegent to changes in their surroundings (ambient intellegence).
The key to the success in ubiquitous computing will be the human factors. The will not be invisble unless human-computer interactions become more natural so that people are not aware that they are using a computer at all.
Example: Amongst mobile phones, digital music players, and many other computers that we don't think of as computers, tablets have become popular. Tablets have been around a long time, the idea has been around for decades, and there have been many effective tablets in this decade. However it didn't gain popularity until people started looking at them in a new way (a new class of device) different from newbooks or laptops. That is what the iPad and the Apple iOS accomplished. It was a shift in perception accomplished through a new user interface that was much more natural to users that had previously existed.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer