Researchers at the University of Kent, UK are putting the finishing touches to a palmtop that could put tourist guides out of business. When you come to the cathedral, itÆll pop up a note on the architecture, or other information customised to the location and the user, says Jason Pascoe, a research associate in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
The prototype will be ready by June. Pascoe is in the final year of a PhD in computer science. He was drawn into the field of æcontext awarenessÆ by work in collaboration with a team of ecologists at the Manchester Metropolitan University. While studying the eating habits of giraffes in Kenya, they wanted handheld computers to replace notebooks, which could register locations of the beasts for later analysis, and the Kent department developed devices to meet their needs.
Most palmtop manufacturers still design the products as if you were sitting down at a desk, says Pascoe. He has had no approaches from industry yet, and hasnÆt thought much about the commercial exploitation of the product. I guess the best people to approach would be the manufacturers themselves like PalmPilot [3Com] and Psion. As to what happens after the PhD, he says IÆd quite like to work in a proper job for a while.
