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Originally Posted by cervezas
I think ambient noise could be a useful input but, to pick up on the theme that Brian is emphasizing here, it's probably got to be something that simplifies the use of the device, not just something that adds a whiz-bang feature.
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Granted. However, the more information that your PDA/smart phone can infer about your environment, the "smarter" the device can behave and the simpler that the user interface becomes.
Referring back to my incomplete example (woops) from an earlier post on this thread, if I'm in a dark environment (detected through the camera), I'm in extremely close proximity to several other cell phones (computable by the wireless provider via e911/poor-man's GPS), and all of the cell phones proximate to me are hearing the same ambient noise around a particular volume, then my PDA could infer that it's in a movie theatre and that it should automatically disable my ringer. This example becomes somewhat more feasable if PDAs could interact with each other anonymously based on external stimuli--bringing me back to intelligent agents! ;-)