A Connection in Every Spot

"If you spend enough time observing people near schools like MIT and Georgia Tech, you'll probably note a few solitary nerds roaming around campus, sniffing out wireless hotspots with their handheld PCs. Chances are that many of those loners are not Wi-Fi junkies on warchalking sorties, but students of 'ubiquitous computing,' a field that aims to free us from our gloomy, workaday PCs by weaving millions of tiny wireless nodes into private and public spaces. Engineers meeting this week at UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous-computing conference in Seattle, believe that technology -- rather than isolating people within virtual spaces -- should be forming real-world connections amongst flesh-and-blood human beings."