| Technology, in order to interact with humans, must be present in the physical world. Thus we need displays, knobs, buttons, and the like. But each such component device would provide more flexibility if it were mainly a virtual object on the world`s network. The Epsilon vision depicts technology such as your stereo receiver or cell phone as composed of small, independent devices, each having a virtual world proxy. These proxies communicate in order to create the effect of a single, larger tool. In the Epsilon limit, a component device is nearly stateless, and typically hosts very little software on the device itself. Rather, the physical location of its software proxy is irrelevant -- it may well be out on the web, running on some possibly distant server. With software defined connections, Epsilon devices will be easily replaced, and can be flexibly reconfigured into different and even unanticipated combinations. The Epsilon project will demonstrate this approach to working with thin devices, and investigate how one can create, modify, monitor, and debug relationships among such devices. |
