June 7th, 2007
Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee waxes on "pixels everywhere"
Using Boston’s Fleet Center (now, the TD BankNorth Garden) as the classic example of where pixels have replaced ad stock, earlier this week at a MITX Technology Awards Ceremony, Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee talked about how there will be pixels everywhere and also of how those pixels may very well end up as the display for your mobile device at any given momemt.
Picture for example, you’re trying to book a flight with Orbitz or Priceline using your smartphone, but you’d rather look at a bigger display. Maybe the display on your smartphone only has 320×200 pixels. But maybe the one on back of the driver’s seat in the cab you’re riding goes up to a resolution of 800×600. According to Berners-Lee, if you trust the service provider that’s providing those pixels to you as an on-demand service, then you may very well choose to use those “seat-back pixels” to serve as the display for your mobile device.
Berners-Lee’s explanation of this scenario — seen in the video above — is more likely his vision of where the mobile Web should be going than it is hypothesis. The mobile Web is one of the initiatives of the World Wide Web Consortium which he directs. In the video, you’ll see how Berners-Lee views the mobile device itself very much the same way as the Web browser — as something that gets out of the users way in terms of accessing data. Said Berners-Lee:
The job of device designers is to get out of the way. Like the job of the designers of the Web browser — the Web browser’s job is to get out of the way. Not be visible. Let the user think they’re looking at the data…. The user shouldn’t be thinking “Oooh, what a nice Web browser.” They should be thinking “What a great place that would be to be on vacation. Click. Bye.”
