• Vision 1: the Memex - Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think".
• Vision 2: Labscape: See:Design of a Smart Environment and A case study of two implementations of Labscape
• Technology 1: Location awareness. The first article catalogs many approaches to determining the absolute or relative location of an object. The second describes a workflow application tracking location in a biotech lab, with the software issues involved in successful implementation. GPS is not the only tracking technology. Consider ultrasonics, or even cellphone transmissions. Here are a presentation and an article on combining GPS with cellphone network localization to make a system stronger than either one alone.
• Technology 2: Wireless connections: - Radio innovations and extensions to the MAC layer protocols are required to solve the "last meter" problem. BlueTooth is close, but not widely in use, yet. And efforts continue to further increase wireless bandwidth and lower wireless cell size. Successful wireless technology does its best to look like it is physical wire.

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