HP Cooltown Project: A Historical Ubicomp System
As you know Hewlett Packard is one of the international information technology companies that provides a variety of hardware and software components to consumers. They also provide their products and services in almost all sectors (education, government, health care, etc.). Apart from their products and services, fewer people know about their research and development contribution to our society. The Hewlett Packard has its laboratory for research and developing innovative technology for the future. The lab was established in the year 1966 to experiment with future technologies. The main goal of the enterprise was to create innovative technologies and generate revenue by selling those advanced products. During the ’90s, they hired 100’s of researchers to work on different projects. In the early ’20s, they started to work on the HP Cooltown project which was based on the ubiquitous computing system.
The HP Cooltown project was based on the idea of connecting “People, Places, and Things” using web presence. The World Wide Web is the location of web presence, which provides information on entities such as websites, blogs, businesses, brands, etc. The two main components in this project are the physical world and the virtual world. In the physical world, the researcher categories the entity into people, places, and things. On another hand, web presence is the main key in the virtual world component. The researcher was trying to create a “point of web presence” with physical entities such as person, place, or thing. The main goal of the HP Cooltown project was to create a strong bridge between the physical and virtual worlds. Thus, the physical object would have a web presence to be accessed by the browser.
The Cooltown ubicomp system includes “pervasive”, “nomadic”, and “context-aware” computing for the future. Hewlett Packard’s Cooltown was a project for the ubicomp system that connected real-world objects with Web. The purpose of the Cooltown project is to create infrastructure for “nomadic computing”. The word “Nomadic” means migratory and it is connected to the moving humans such as in their daily life moving to a home, work, outing, or shopping, etc. The goal of this project was to expand the access of people, places, and things by connecting them with web content. The observation behind this idea is that “every object could have a Web page capable of describing it, such as its name, ownership, origin, and associated network services, etc” (web presence). Therefore, the nomadic user would have access to the device, information, or service through web presence.
To create the bridge between the physical and virtual world, they attached proximity beacon, tag, embedded processors, and wireless transceivers to the physical entity. The tag or beacon provides a unique link to the identifier and connects to the point of web presence (URL). This web model of the physical component allows us ubiquitous access. One of the biggest innovative technology we received from this project is printer sharing technology.
The idea was to use complex devices such as printers and other devices to embed a webserver into it so the device can be accessed through a network connection. In the corporate companies, it is more important to track all the equipment, and attaching a unique encode ID can create a web presence. This technology is the combination of the web presence, devices, and wireless communication, which created a different kind of Ubicomp system in our society. This project will remove the centralized usage of the device for nomadic users.
This idea was originated because there was a lack of connection between the real-world and the virtual world. In the early 20s, there were multiple devices humans were using which they do not have access to when they move around. For instance, the old printer was accessed by one person and there was no connection to the web. There was not portability if multiple users want to use the same device. Therefore, the idea of Cooltown implemented to create a bridge between the device and the web. This idea allowed us to add unique tags and other identification technologies to the devices and connect with the web. This allowed wireless communication with different devices and multiple users can send the data to the device using the web. On other word, we could say a web model of the physical entity for nomadic users.
To test the “nomadic computing”, the HP labs have created a Cooltown Museum experiment. The visitor of the museum was provided a portable digital assistant (PDA) which can receive URLs form wireless “beacons”. They have also added a small infrared transceiver under the artifact, which will transmit a URL link with all information about the sculpture. The visitors will have access to more information about the artifact compare to writing on board. Also, they can bookmark the links and used them to buy the reproduction of the sculpture from the museum’s online store.
The bridge between the physical and virtual world that was created by this project provided great innovative technology in today’s world. From this historical system, one of the technologies we use today is the Indego electric bicycle in the big cities. The Indego electric bicycle is being used by our community for transportation in a crowded area. It is a public bicycle sharing system that could be borrowed and return to any of its stations. The consumers can use their smartphone to locate the station and open spot to return the bicycle. We can use the Indego web presence or application in the portable device (Smartphone) to acquire all the information and services they provide. This current technology expresses the bridge between people, places, or things and web presence.
The strong connection between the physical and virtual world produce technological driven solutions. As we know, the metropolitan city problem is very different than the suburban area, such as locating parking. Thus, the technological solutions coming in the play. We all know parking is a big problem when you travel in the downtowns, so portable devices and smart parking apps are the solutions to the problem. The users can use this parking app to locate free or paid parking places around the downtown area. This technology is environment friendly since the user will not waste fuel in the traffic and locating the right spot.
HP CoolTown Commercial from 2000
vs.
Amazon Alex: Coming Home
In both commercials, we can see the technology gap in the generations. The HP Cooltown commercial displays the innovative technology which was not in the market during that time. On another hand, Amazon Alex is currently advance technology which is very popular in the current generation. We can see in both commercial web, sensors, proximity beacon, tag, embedded processors and wireless transceivers are being used to connect with other smart devices. The embedded processors, beacon, wireless connectivity, and voice recognized sensor host (Alexa) have brought a new generation of the smart home. The sensors, embedded processors, and other devices got small and less expensive over time, which created the bridge stronger over time. Those are the key tools used to create a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds.
The HP Cooltown project was established around two decades ago, but it is a great example of a ubicomp computing system.
References:
Kindberg, T., Barton, J., Morgan, J., Becker, G., Caswell, D., Debaty, P., Gopal, G., Frid, M., Krishnan, V., Morris, H., Schettino, J., Serra, B., and Spasojevic, M., People, places, things: Web presence for the real world, Mobile Networks and Applications 7(5): 365–376, 2002.
Karkera, Roshan. “Multiple Computer to Single Printer.” Techie Inspire, techieinspire.com/connect-share-multiple-computers-single-printer/.
Kinsley, Sam. Yesterday’s Tomorrows. 28 Aug. 2008, www.samkinsley.com/pdf/skinsley_yesterday_280808.pdf.
Shim, Richard. “HP Founds CoolTown in Internet Territory.” CNET, CNET, 3 Jan. 2002, www.cnet.com/news/hp-founds-cooltown-in-internet-territory/.
“YouTube Video .” HP Cool Town from 2000, 1 July 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2AkkuIVV-I.
“Youtube Video.” Amazon Alexa: Coming Home, 28 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPOfbhRQpMk.
