| PEBBLES project explores communicating among home devices |
Jul. 29, 2003
One interesting research project being highlighted at this week's Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is "PEBBLES," a project at Carnegie Mellon University which explores the control of future home appliances using PDAs and smartphones. PEBBLES (which stands for "PDAs for the Entry of Both Bytes and Locations from External Sources") is looking at the many ways handheld devices can be used in conjunction desktop PCs and other devices in our homes -- including telephones, stereos, refrigerators, and more.
The idea behind PEBBLES is this: "Rather than spending hours manually programming functions into a universal remote control, you could have your mobile phone or Pocket PC use your home's wireless network to automatically 'discover' all of the nearby devices and their capabilities. And then, using artificial intelligence, it could design an intuitive user interface to control them all."
PEBBLES is based on a Personal Universal Controller (PUC) which takes advantage of a number of enabling technologies from Microsoft, such as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), C#, and the .NET Compact Framework, to enable devices to carry on two-way conversations with each other for the purposes of entertainment and control.
"Our philosophy is, we can think of neat new things for these devices to do beyond their basic function as organizers and communication devices, and since millions of people have them anyway, let's take advantage of them," said Brad Myers, a senior research scientist in the Human Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
From the project's website . . . "The six year old Pebbles project is exploring the many ways that small handheld Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) can serve as a useful adjunct to the "fixed" computers in those situations. One set of applications supports meetings where the participants are co-located. All participants' PDAs are in continuous two-way communication with each other, and with the main computer which is often projected on a screen to serve as the focal point of the discussion. For classrooms, we are investigating how the student's hand-helds can enhance testing and notetaking when they are connected to the instructor's PC. Another set of applications supports a single user using the PDA as an extra input and output device. In the future, we will also explore the use of the PDA as a customizable, intelligent front end to other applications and devices."
Born six years ago as a small undergraduate project, PEBBLES has grown to encompass about 30 students and millions of dollars in support from various government and industry sources, including Microsoft Research.
Microsoft said it has supported the program since 1998 with five grants designated from Microsoft Research and the Windows CE 3.0 development group. Other Pebble sponsorships have come from organizations like DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Corporate sponsorhips have come from GM, IBM, Symbol Technologies, HP, Lucent and others in the way of financial contributions as well as equipment donations.
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