“We’re not trying to replace anything. We’re just trying to augment existing modes of interaction,” says Barry Solomon, product planner and strategist at Intel. “We’re adding senses to the computer’s brain so it can perceive its surroundings, who’s interacting with it, and make those interactions more intuitive.”
If that sounds ambitious, it has to: in a practical sense, perceptual computing is Intel’s attempt to keep laptops relevant in a consumer-tech landscape increasingly overtaken by phones, tablets, motion-controlled gaming consoles, and other post-Wintel devices offering novel, intuitive user experiences (see “
The Pressure’s On for Intel”).
