TeacherTabletPC

Hawk Tour is a system to give tours at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From the Hawk Tour web site:

HawkTour is a proof-of-concept application designed to exhibit pervasive computing in a real-world application. HawkTour is context aware which allows it to give tours of the campus center without having a live guide. More than just an application, the real value is in the underlying architecture upon which HawkTour is built as it is extensible to any environment.

HawkTour demonstrates pervasive computing, a technology that radically changes the way we think and deal with computers. Pervasive computing makes computers invisible as it seamlessly integrates computing and networking power into our environment. Using context aware applications, our environment becomes intelligent enough to interact with us in a natural way. Eventually, mundane chores can be done by smart devices letting us be far more productive.

The pervasive computing page on IIT’s Computer Science Department web site talks more about Hawk Tour in the context of pervasive computing in general:

Hawk Tour is a context aware Campus Tour application, a project conducted at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) via an Inter-professional (Ipro) team. It provides Campus information on demand. It runs on PDAs, Tablet PCs, and other mobile devices, and the content can be shown on the digital devices or on a display interface near by. IITour is supported, wirelessly, by a campus wide context-aware middleware. Once it is initiated it will be completely driven by user location and intent. Based on the current location and his/her orientation (or the PDA’s orientation) of a user, it dynamically retrieves necessary campus information and presents it to user through the user-friendly interface. It shows map of the current location and it’s associated campus information, like near room, nearby restroom, Coffee shop, a historic wall, some historic information about the building etc. The key point is, the information are presented to user based on his current location and action are taken based on it’s intent.

Having a location- and/or orientation-aware Tablet PC opens up a wealth of possible applications.