Human Centered Computing 3

Insights and Experiences: The third major evolutionary stage is being propelled by the easy availability and utilization of multimodal sensory data and devices with ability to capture, play, store and process sensory data.  This phase will bring Insights and Experience to the main stage in a similar way as the last phase brought information and communication.  Information is important to implement decisions.  To make decisions one requires insights.  And insights are closely correlated to experiences.  Experience is defined as active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill.   Humans experience events and activities using their sensory tools: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.  Sensing technology has resulted in efficient approaches for converting sight, sound, and touch to electronic form and then back for human perception.  Smell and taste remain relatively difficult.  Fortunately, sight and sound are two major senses used by humans in experiencing the world around them and creating knowledge of their environment.  This stage will help in augmenting cognitive capabilities of humans.  This could lead to several revolutionary approaches for expanding the results of computing to that part of the world, more than 80% population, which has remained relatively untouched by computing so far.