And voice and character recognition software is becoming more sophisticated and head mounted displays are shrinking in size every day. Many of these problems can be collected together into five main areas. A Laboratory in this area would examine the next generation of Internet application protocols and their evolution into pervasive information services and knowledge tools. Pervasive computing is making us rethink and re-invent the way software is designed. A Laboratory in this area would investigate software components which are now the preferred programming paradigm.
Software agents are components that migrate around the network doing work on our behalf.
The key to making pervasive computing work is the software interoperability that exists today. 3.2 Pervasive Computing and Advanced Telecommunications Telecommunications is the glue that binds the increasingly dense pervasive computing environment together. When we think about modern telecommunication, it is easy to forget how much it has evolved in last 160 years. Figure 1 illustrates a brief chronology of telecommunications and the Internet's evolution. Of course it is not surprising to note that the density of invention has grown exponentially with the passing of time.