Simplifying the complexity of our social, device, and information networks

With an interdisciplinary team that includes computer and social scientists, along with security and privacy experts, PARC has been a founding pioneer in the spread of technologies throughout our natural environment. PARC is pursuing Mark Weiser's seminal vision of Ubiquitous Computing, by generating advances in three fundamental dimensions:

Ubiquity: We develop systems and solutions to increase the ubiquity of networks and computation, providing infrastructures that reduce the complexity of the underlying systems to optimize interoperability.

Natural interaction: We invent and evaluate technologies that provide more natural interaction between people and content, using novel interaction technologies; e.g., touch and computer vision.

Proactivity: We apply findings from social and behavioral sciences to create technologies that model and predict human behaviors and needs to create systems that proactively filter, sort, prioritize and present information, as well as taking physical actions when appropriate.

Read the white paper, "Creating new business opportunities through ubiquitous computing."

applications and enabling technologies

"Obje" interoperability framework

Obje is an interoperability framework that tackles the compatibility problem, one of the biggest hurdles that content and device makers face as they try to facilitate digital media playback on all devices while introducing new capabilities, protocols and formats. Obje enables devices to teach each other how to communicate with one another. It is device-, OS- and network-agnostic, for running on a virtual machine. A network or a direct connection sends code to the devices. Obje works with varied networking technologies and need not be loaded on every device in the network to work.

"Responsive Mirror" to enhance retail experience

The Responsive Mirror is an implicitly controlled video technology for clothes fitting rooms that allows a shopper to directly compare a garment being worn with images from the previously worn garment. The orientation of images from past trials is matched to the shopper’s pose as he moves. The fitting-area mirror is a specific “point of decision” where a customer interacts with products to select a subset of items to purchase. Shoppers may also store images online to share with family and online social networks. The development of the Responsive Mirror is based on PARC's combination of research advances across multiple disciplines: marketing, computer science, interaction design and computer vision.

"Magitti" recommendation system for mobile devices

An activity-centric recommendation system for leisure activities, "Magitti" (developed for Dai Nippon Printing) recommends information about restaurants, stores, parks, museums, events and articles based on your current situation and a prediction of your likely leisure activity, based on observations of your past behaviors. PARC social and computer scientists combined in-house competencies in context modeling, preference modeling, recommender systems, location sensing, activity detection, user experience design, mobile hand-held user interfaces, and text mining. Read the case study to learn how Japan-based Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd., worked with PARC to discover a new market and develop Magitti.

“3D Wiki”

Merging Web 2.0 technologies and virtual worlds, our 3D Wiki system enables you to collaboratively create, explore, and annotate complex 3D objects online. Each “page” blends a 3D viewer with textual content; a state engine connects these components together, thus allowing textual tags to control actions in the 3D space and, conversely, allowing actions in the 3D space to affect the text being displayed. Unlike other virtual worlds technologies, PARC’s 3D Wiki is focused on facilitating interactions around objects. The system suits a wide range of business applications, such as remote servicing of complex machinery and training of inexperienced technicians.