The right approach, I think

http://www.oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

Having glanced through the websites of several "ubiquitous computing" research groups, I think that the Oxygen project at MIT is the closest I've seen to "something on the right track" Partly I occasionally track / glance at what's happening in this field because I think it could become an interesting thing to be involved in in the future. Partly I keep looking at it because I have this sneaking suspicion that, when we start getting to pervasively embedded small computers, HCI will start looking like a robotics problem. And partly I'm interested in how the network connectivity for pervasive computing might work : perhaps the distributed robotics and ad-hoc network people have a head-start on some of the issues that might come up.