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.
The focus and deliverables for Project Mercury will be:
New modes for building educational experiences, and tools for reinforcing the interactions among a community of scholars. A testbed to learn how new types of portable data services can be integrated into a stable business ecology. 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; A deeper understanding of how wireless mobile computing is used, and what the potential is for increasing organizational productivity and increasing personal enjoyment.