Research Seminar - March 07, 2003

The End of Reading and Writing

Abstract:

The talk will start with a short movie describing Microsoft's vision of the future of the electronic book. This movie gives a history of writing and printing and argues that ordinary paper books will be replaced by electronic ones sometime around 2013.

Hermann Maurer will claim that this vision is much too conservative. Rather, reading and writing as we know it today will indeed cease to have any importance within the next 50 years. He will present historical, statistical, biological and technical arguments for this provocative thesis. His main arguments would be :

• Small hand-held devices, not much bigger than a credit card and powered by tiny fuel cells, will be the focal point of personal computing by 2010.
• A variety of wearable sensors will be networked by a modernized version of blue-tooth technology.
• There will be no need for traditional input/output devices like keyboards and monitors. They will be replaced by speech recognisers, virtual keyboards and eye-glass like displays.
• Ideas and emotions will be captured in the future in the form of new kinds of multimedia documents. This is already the basis of MUSLI, the MUlti Sensory User Interface project.

However, when we consume all information from such devices it should be clear that the way information is presented also changes, and what this could be is the main driving force behind the MIRACLE project. He will discuss a few samples of MUSLI attempts and how it relates to the project MIRACLE (Multimedia Information Repository: A Computer-Based language Effort).

This seminar is presented in conjunction with IVEC