I think of it as similar in its final goal as at&t/olivetti research's "The Bat" ubiquitous or sentient computing project. These links provide some good example

I think of it as similar in its final goal as at&t/olivetti research's "The Bat" ubiquitous or sentient computing project. These links provide some good examples of stuff they did with that: http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/events/dag2002/program/ws/Beresford-Harle.pdf http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/events/dag2002/program/ws/Beresfor... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/shodges/videos/sentient%20computing%206min23.mpg http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/shodges/videos... in short, the physical world can be treated as a user interface to computers. There's a large technical distinction of course; in the case of the bat, getting the technology up and running to do this was sophisticated enough that the video i linked to spends a large portion explaining how it works. they used centralized computers and centralized sensors (echo-locators) to figure out where the device you are holding is within a known environment. Nowadays, we can put so much compute power and so many sensors in a device you are holding that it can figure out its own environment instead.