Editorial: ubiquitous computing in the real world

The ubiquitous computing vision places humans at the centre of environments saturated with computing and wireless communications capacity yet gracefully integrated, so that technology recedes in the background of everyday activities. In the past decade or so, this vision has provided a strong focus for research and has supplied the foundation for the development of an agenda that has attracted intense interest by the research community. Turning this vision into reality is clearly a long term aim but there are already a variety of mechanisms, techniques, methods and systems that have come out of this work and have been used in building—possibly limited—but nevertheless real systems. A small number of such technologies have already proven robust enough to support real world applications at a larger scale outside the laboratory. While such systems may fall short of implementing the complete vision they nevertheless have considerable value: by creating up a situation of ubiquitous computing within the real world they highlight a variety of issues and provide useful lessons that cannot be gained in laboratory experiments or with systems deployed at smaller scales. In this special issue we aim to report on lessons learnt through attempts to bring ubiquitous computing to the real world. We are interested in the opportunities but also the limitations of ubiquitous computing systems implementation in real situations in terms of technology, interaction, economics, regulation and market dynamics. We explore the changes that ubiquitous systems bring when they become part of everyday life. We are especially interested in systems that attempt to balance the different, frequently contradicting requirements of a real world environment, for example by catering to identified social interaction needs while addressing specific regulatory constraints. Indeed, ubiquitous computing applications potentially present an altogether new set of requirements compared to existing information systems and demand a new approach to deal with their effects at the personal, group, community or society level. To this end, this special issue collects reports from a variety of experiences with real world ubiquitous computing. In the first part, we discuss two case studies of large-scale systems based on RFID: the Oyster card project which controls access to the Metropolitan transport network in London and caters for more than five million users daily; and the new consumer services developed by the Japanese retailer Mitsukoshi in Tokyo. The second part of this special issue includes a collection of papers that present experiences with different ubiquitous computing systems in the real world. Newman, Ducheneaut, Edwards, Sedivy and Smith discuss their support for the unremarkable by presenting their experiences with the Object Display Mirror; Huang, Mynatt and Trimble question the limitations of design in ubicomp by examining the unanticipated challenges of the real world for large collaborative displays; Kjeldskov and Skov examine the use of ubicomp in a particularly interesting domain G. Roussos (&) Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: g.roussos@birkbeck.ac.uk URL: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~gr