Invisible Computers: Where have all the desktops gone?

Written by: Khang Nguyen

           Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are currently working on a project, which is going to make computers virtually invisible to the eye. This research project is a five-year project and is currently funded for 50 million dollars.

            The Oxygen Alliance is a project that is designed to make computers invisible. About 250 MIT researchers are working on the project, which is being funded by the federal government and six other corporations. The goal of the project is to replace desktop computers and keyboards with small, handheld devices and out-of-sight units that would be built into walls and ceilings and respond to the human voice. This would also mean that even the beloved mouse would become obsolete.

            The vision of the project is to establish a network of computers that will be used in transportation, homes, offices, and other places where people go. The real goal of the so-called “invisible computers” is to get away from desktop computers that people greatly depend on everyday. 

            Currently the key element of this project is basically human speech; this is used for the voice activation of these computers.  The Spoken Language Systems group at M.I.T. has been working to develop speech recognition programs that will let users talk to their computers the same way as they do to others. A cool feature being worked on that will allow computers to identify people by their facial features and track where they go and determine what people are looking at are being developed by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at M.I.T. also.

            Just imagine that someday everything that we see around us (mainly indoors) will probably be computerize, especially the walls.  Here’s an idea, if you don’t like the color of your wall you may simply command the computer to change the color as you do with the wallpaper on your desktop.  These highly sophisticated computers will be able to recognize human speech and become easy to communicate with.            

For more information go to

MIT: http://www.lcs.mit.edu/news/releases/release?name=oxygen

CNET: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2122643.html?tag=st