DETERMINING how people will live with the technology of the future is the aim of a new six-year collaborative project involving researchers from the University of Southampton and seven other institutions in the UK.

The £10 million project, known as Equator, will look at how digital technology could radically affect the homes, schools, theatres and even streets of the future, changing and evolving the relationship between the physical and digital worlds.

International experts in human/computer interaction, virtual reality and wearable computers will be investigating new ways of using digital technology in everyday items such as signposts, furniture and even clothes. The Southampton team will be concentrating on the design of software systems.

"As digital technologies have matured, they have begun to move beyond the workplace to other areas of our everyday lives - our homes and neighbourhoods, as well as what we wear and carry with us,'' said Professor Wendy Hall of the University's Department of Electronics and Computer Science.

"The spread of the Internet has enabled the public to participate in a variety of online experiences, such as e-mail, distributed hypermedia and virtual reality.

"Despite developments there are still many everyday activities where the boundary between physical environments and digital space is often too complex and poorly designed. This project will look at ways of improving the integration of the physical with the digital,'' she said. The Equator research programme is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The participating universities are Lancaster, Nottingham, Southampton, Bristol, Glasgow, Sussex, University College London, and the Royal College of Art. Members of the project team, which will be led by Professor Tom Rodden at Lancaster, will also be working on hardware, computer graphics, mobile multimedia systems, art and design, information sciences and social and cognitive sciences.

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