Saturday, January 18, 2014

Location-aware appliances

Location-aware appliances

Location-aware appliances



The text below this breakout box was drafted April 20, 2000. In moving this Web page to BellSouth/AT&T in November 2009, following the closure of Geocities by Yahoo!, I discovered that much of the text I published in The IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin (ITDB) [1987-03], cited below, now appears online here as Absolute Display Window Mouse/Mice. No later than March 1987, the ITDB would start to strip the author name(s) off its articles, making attribution of the work more problematic. But happily for me, I am still identified as the author of this article, through corroboration by US patent 5274363, at the top of its "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" section. (Thanks, Ted.)

Today, a generation later, the concept of a location- and orientation-aware appliance is well-known to millions of people, who enjoy this cool methodology to interact naturally with common new devices like the Apple iPhone, demonstrated in the video below.

The graphic below describes the use of miniature flat-panel displays which can sense their location within a room to build huge virtual displays which exploit the "memory palace" aspect of human cognition. In particular, it observes the relationship of my technical disclosure of the mid 1980's to some subsequent work in the field.

Ron Feigenblatt