Project Mercury

Project Mercury is a five-year research program that will define and prototype the future of mobile, personal communications, using the MIT campus and surrounding community as a testbed. Just as MIT changed education by making the personal computer an individual resource in the 1980's, Project Mercury will reinvent education and community by providing the MIT community with a staged series of open wireless computing platforms where the entire MIT community can invent, reflect, and iterate the future of personal communications.

Timeliness

Project Mercury is timely because the locus of technology is moving from the place to the person. Home telephones were once the rule, now the number is associated with an individual. Whereas once, we might have wanted a navigation system in an automobile, now it is clear that it belongs in the pocket. The display and amplifiers might come from a car, but outfitting it as a platform is no longer the right idea. Similarly, broadband is still contemplated as a service to a home, but increasingly the services, and soon the connectivity itself, will migrate to the owner.

Background

To date, wireless carriers and mobile handset manufacturers have marched in the same lockstep pattern as Intel and Microsoft. End-user manufacturers have built what the carriers have requested, and those that did best at that job did well in the business. That is poised to change. Worldwide wireless, mobile computing is challenging the PC and wired Internet as the platform of choice, and the engines of innovation and entrepreneurial effort are becoming focused on this industry

At MIT we have seen a huge interest in development of new applications and services that make use of new wireless services and the programming capabilities of the new mobile devices. One example of this interest is that several of the recent winners of MIT's famous annual business plan competition based their plan on wireless mobile platforms, and are working with handset makers and carriers to turn their vision into reality.

This is reminiscent of the situation that gave rise to the Athena project at MIT, where IBM, DEC, Sun and others used MIT students as a way of experimenting with new interface and networking technologies. The first examples of Instant Messaging, the code for Direct X, and some of the basic elements of the Web came out of that effort. What we propose is that in a similar manner handset maker and wireless carriers could benefit immensely from focusing the resources of MIT on mobile computing, and encouraging development of new programming environments, new types of applications, and new sensor/effector capabilities for wireless mobile platforms.

Operation

Project Mercury will be built with the cooperation of at least two equipment manufacturers and two carriers who can operate on the MIT campus and its immediate environs. This five-year plan would engage students, faculty and researchers in the creation of new opportunities for mobile voice, data and media. It will operate both as an experimental facility and as an operational component in the teaching and research. It would develop new interfaces and protocols for communication, and test them through deployed applications both within MIT and and surrounding community.

The value to participating companies is that it is faster and more efficient to let the customers invent the products than to invent, test and market your own ideas. Project Mercury provides them with a ready community of passion-driven inventors, an open, malleable platform on which to experiment, and a scalable technology through which raw ideas can easily diffuse, become refined, and evolve.

Concretely Project Mercury would have a small core team of research scientists and faculty to coordinate the effort and perform technology transfer while reserving the majority of funding for building and testing new vertical applications, with special emphasis on creating cross-project development tools and standards, and including results from end-user study projects.

Participants would include not only the immediate MIT community, but also the local urban residents and the local entreprenurial community. Local primary schools, eldercare facilities, and the City of Cambridge have all expressed great enthusiasm for Project Mercury. Project Mercury would also provide a testbed for researchers from the Sloan School of Management, the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Media Lab, and several other units within MIT.

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Outputs

The focus and deliverables for Project Mercury would be:

  • New modes for building educational experiences, and tools for reinforcing the MIT community. Project Mercury will make MIT the place where the future is happening, and will draw top-notch students from around the globe.
  • A testbed to learn how new types of portable data services can be integrated into a stable business ecology. We will do this both in the MIT community and as outreach projects done in the local and global community.
  • New application-building tools and interface standards that integrate industries whose business is predicated on communications into a productive, virtuous cycle with infrastructure providers.
  • New application ideas, seeds for new enterprises, and initial user evaluation of those ideas within the Project Mercury testbed as a faculty/student invention contest, analogous (or even part of) the famous MIT $50k competition.
  • The creation of an open wireless "kit", with a simple software "API" that allows users to easily build a personal health system, a communicator, a wallet, a storage resource, or any consumer-style product.
  • Practical sensor and effector architectures for inclusion into personal terminals (e.g., RFID and barcode readers, storage and security devices, etc., etc.).
  • A deeper understanding of how wireless mobile computing is used, and what the potential is for increasing organizational productivity and increasing personal enjoyment.
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