Anant Agarwal, a professor and researcher at the MIT is involved in 'Project Oxygen' along with 149 other researchers, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

At the centre of the research, which is in its fifth year, is a re-programmable chip called 'RAW'- raw architecture workstation.

It is one of many key pieces in MIT's $50 million project funded partly by the Defence Advanced Research, projects agency of the Pentagon, which developed the Internet and achieved many other major breakthroughs.

Agarwal, said the Post, wants to redesign chip software and hardware for the mobile age, creating chips that will be chameleon-like, fulfilling many purposes, so that people could get more done with less gear. It will theoretically make computing more mobile.

Also, devices embedded in "intelligent" rooms and stationary objects could accomplish more by simply retrieving new instruction sets. "Call it a universal logic chip that can do anything," Agarwal told the Post.

 The goal of the project is to create a new computing environment, in which computer capability would be ubiquitous and manipulating computers as easy for people as breathing, the paper said.

Project Oxygen researchers want people to throw away the mouse and talk to their computers, some of which would be embedded in walls and ceilings.