LONDON, England (CNN) -- In the future, computers won't be bulky, desk-based objects, but a seamless network of chips and microprocessors integrated everywhere into the environment around us.
That, at least, is the vision behind "pervasive computing," whose proponents imagine a world in which information processing and communication capabilities are built into the clothes we wear and the buildings and rooms we inhabit.
The term itself has a relatively recent history, dating back to the technology boom of the late 1990s, yet in many ways pervasive computing is already with us.
"We are producing approximately 150 million chips that go into computers, but something like eight billion processors that go into everything else such as cars or televisions," Professor Morten Kyng, director of the Center for Pervasive Computing at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
The aim of pervasive computing, however, is to use those microprocessors in radically different ways and to give people greater control over them, says Kyng.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/04/pervasive.computing/index.html
