Linked into the superorganism of a smart room, my chair will recognize me when I sit in it, versus someone else. It can then assist my routine, awakening appliances that need a warm-up, preparing the day's schedule. In Weiser's world of environmental computing, the big display in every room is the smartest nonhuman in the room. The big screen does movies, text, super graphics, whatever. It almost goes without saying that it is interconnected with all the other objects in the room, knows exactly what they are up to, and can represent them on its screen with some faithfulness.
Every room becomes an environment of computation.
The adaptive nature of computers recedes into the background until it is nearly invisible and ubiquitous. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. The technology of writing descended from elite status, steadily lowering itself out of our consciousness altogether until we now hardly notice words scribbled everywhere from logos stamped on fruit to movie subtitles. One component after another, once well above the surface of the microcosm, falls into the invisible sphere, and is never again seen clearly by the naked eye. The adaptive technologies that computers bring us started out as huge, conspicuous, and centralized.