Futurismic

A world of spime-like networked and sensor-laden appliances, objects, and general stuff took a step closer with an assortment of tech titans announcing their intention to create an Internet Protocol for Smart Objects:

Smart objects are objects in the physical world that - typically with the help of embedded devices - transmit information about their condition or environment (e.g., temperature, light, motion, health status) to locations where the information can be analyzed, correlated with other data and acted upon. Applications range from automated and energy-efficient homes and office buildings, factory equipment maintenance and asset tracking to hospital patient monitoring and safety and compliance assurance.

Suggestions for colloquial names for this technology:

• The Interject (INTERnet of obJECTs).
• The Thinweb (a WEB of THINgs).
• The Stufflink (you get it)

Any more?

As computation and connectivity continue to ooze their way into everything from dildos to doorbells can we think of any interesting science fictional consequences?

[via Slashdot][image from MikeBlogs on flickr]

Related posts

• Your five-year internet fast starts now, courtesy of Elton John (4)
• Wolfram’s Magnum Opus Online (1)
• With Knol, Google enters the knowledge market (0)
• WIRED autopsies crowdsourcing experiment (0)
• Wikipedia Colored By Editor’s Reputation (1)

Computer hardware can be a real bitch to recycle, as attested by massive landfills in developing nations and closer to home. Someone in an organisation called EPCglobal has evidently been paying attention to Bruce Sterling, because their plan to tag all new-built computer components with unique RFID chips containing data about how, where and when they were made sounds pretty similar to Sterling’s “spimes”. [image by southernpixel]

Now, if we could just give them GPS devices so they could navigate themselves back to their point of manufacture…

Related posts

• You Are Officially Mentally Disturbed (3)
• Where in the World? (0)
• Virus on space station searched for video game logins (0)
• Vaccine worms to spread virus patches? (1)
• Urban mining - there’s gold in that there techno-junk (2)

Good old DARPA comes up with some comparatively solid practical ideas in between the really bat-shit crazy stuff. Take the “Individual Force Protection System”, for example, which is essentially a way of tagging troops with traceable devices so they can be found if things get hairy on the battlefield. [via grinding.be]

The Land Warrior hardware can be used to locate its wearer too, but that might understandably get ditched by troops in a rout due to its bulk. By contrast, the IFPS is a little plastic cylinder that could be strung next to a soldiers dogtags, and allegedly allows him or her to be detected from up to 150km away without the use of GPS technology. [image by SoldiersMediaCenter]

Soldiers as spimes, anyone?

Related posts

• When cybermoths attack! (0)
• Twitter - the newest addition to the terrorism toolbox? (1)
• New fighter pilot helmet makes plane "invisible" (0)
• More tech for the military (1)
• Los Alamos’ Roadrunner supercomputer breaks petaflop barrier (0)

Finding photos in old books and not having any clue as to the locations they depict could become yet another mild annoyance thrown into the furnace of perpetual progress.

Comp-sci boffins at Carnegie-Mellon University have developed a system called IM2GPS that can identify the probable geographic location of a given image. From the abstract of the paper:

In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earth’s surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban/rural classification.

The trend is towards every piece of data being tagged with a location: here we see a way of legacy information (old photos) being given a “probable geographic location” without having originally being created with a time/GPS location stamp. It would still only be a general guess as to a geographic area, but it is better than nothing.

This is part of a more general trend towards what Bruce Sterling calls Spimes. From the Man himself:

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

In the case of IM2GPS it is the data itself that is being recorded and tracked, and potentially the objects the data describes (the objects in the photos) which connects with another loosely related concept: the panopticon. Imagine if you combined IM2GPS technology with facial recognition software and put CCTV archives through this kind of process. You could essentially Spimify the population retrospectively!

Hysterically delusional paranoia aside this is a fascinating development. Read the paper in full (pdf), it’s well worth it.

[story via PhysOrg][images by Reto Stockli and QR-Code Generator]

Related posts

• Welcome to the United Kingdom of Ubiquitous Surveillance (2)
• Urban cyclists and the participatory panopticon (1)
• Top 10 predictions for 2009 (1)
• The secret life of shipping containers (3)
• Surveillance as (dark) art - the Static Obesity Logging devive (1)

When Bruce Sterling spots something and considers it worthy of note, you can assume he knows what he’s on about - especially if it’s connected to his spimes idea.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see the huge disruptive potential of the "personal manufacturing network" business model behind Ponoko. I’ll simply quote their site, because I couldn’t put it more succinctly than this:

"Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.

The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites."

Poke around the site, and think about it. One of the few things I’ve seen recently where the tired cliche "this could change everything" really does apply.

Related posts

• Print-on-demand in three dimensions - Shapeways beta launches (3)
• Where in the World? (0)
• When 3D spam got old (10)
• Toys of the Trade (0)
• The future of social networking (1)