2 Four Paradigms and Six Technologies

Introduction

You aren't reading this book to learn about small new features of existing apps, but rather to more deeply understand what we are calling the "Fourth Paradigm" of personal computing―Spatial Computing.

This chapter will bring you up to date on the technology you need to know about to understand where Spatial Computing came from, where it's going, and why it's so fundamentally different than the desktops or mobile phones that came before, even though it is using a lot of technology invented for the machines of earlier paradigms. Spatial Computing is the fourth paradigm, and we see it as the most personal of all the personal computing paradigms yet to come. We will cover six technologies that enable Spatial Computing to work: Optics and Displays, Wireless and Communications, Control Mechanisms (Voice and Hands), Sensors and Mapping, Compute Architectures (new kinds of Cloud Computing, for instance), and Artificial Intelligence (Decision Systems).