Things Are Getting Smarter

Ford is leveraging RFID tech to help workers track their tools.

Developed with DEWALT and ThingMagic, Tool Link offers owners the capability to mark and scan high-value tools, safety equipment, material inventories and other important assets using RFID tags. When the vehicle is running, a pair of RFID antennas, mounted in corrosion- and impact-resistant housings on the inside of the pickup box, scan the box for the items on a pre-programmed inventory list.

The data is transmitted to a reader mounted inside the cab and displayed on the in-dash computer screen, alerting the driver if any inventoried tools are not loaded on the truck.

And PC World opines on the near-future of smart objects.

We’re entering the era of “ambient intelligence,” when everyday objects will contain technology that broadcasts data about themselves and their environment, says Liebhold.

As you approach a dangerous intersection, sensors in your car will detect it and reduce speed. GPS coordinates of places unsafe to walk at night will be broadcast to mobile devices.

In Japan, location-based services from GeoVector let the Mapions Pointing Application deliver information on businesses inside a building at the point of a GPS-enabled camera phone. U.S. handsets with the technology should appear by year’s end.

In homes, floor sensors will detect empty rooms and automatically lower the thermostat and turn off lights. Agilewaves, a firm started by ex-NASA scientists, is working with builders to install sensors on electrical switches, pipes, and gas valves. Eventually they hope to offer neighborhoods, subdivisions, or municipalities a big-picture view of their carbon footprint.

where is my rfid cat?

Deeper into the Googleplex:

One plan, which has already tentatively started, entails making literally everything in the world accessible at the click of a button. For now, this means every book, piece of music, film, TV and radio broadcast, official document and photograph.

But eventually… Google boffins believe it can be extended to people and their personal belongings.

The idea is that we, and our treasured possessions, will be fitted with minute microchips which could be linked to the internet, via computers, by a digital radio frequency.

In this way, you would only have to type “Where is my watch” or “Find Joe Bloggs” into your PC or handheld computer, and Google could assist you.

…More immediately, Google is switching its main focus from PCs and laptops to mobile phones.

tomorrow is here

Smashing Magazine has a brief but nice round-up of items under the title User Experience of the Future. They list several technologies under development – some of which I’ve blogged about on a few occasions, like multi-touch and the Reactable – all of which taken together certainly paint an intriguing near-future. Off the radar are the skunk works, undiscovered breakthroughs, and emergent interactions between devices and their interface with user communities that will push the ever extruding scifi narrative further into weirdness and fancifulness. Crowley considered the new age as being represented by the spiritization of matter, and I think we’re seeing that on greater and greater scales as the lines between human and machine, imagination and reality, continue to blur into strange new forms. As Clarke wrote, that which is sufficiently technologically advanced is indistinguishable from magic.

superubiquitous computing

From an interview with William Gibson in the latest Rolling Stone:

Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?

People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we’re going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven’t really figured out quite how porous it is.

My SPIME is the bassline

More and more, objects are becoming intelligent. The realm of the senses will extend to encompass networks and interface layers within the world around us. Scifi author and guru Bruce Sterling devised the acronym SPIME to describe the path of a prototypical smart object from birth to death and beyond.

SPIME is a neologism for a currently-theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object…The six facets of spimes are:

1. Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely identifying objects over short ranges; in other words, radio-frequency identification.
2. A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth, such as a global-positioning system.
3. A way to mine large amounts of data for things that match some given criteria, like internet search engines.
4. Tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object; computer-aided design.
5. Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones. Sophisticated, automated fabrication of a specification for an object, through “three-dimensional printers.”
6. “Cradle-to-cradle” life-spans for objects. Cheap, effective recycling.

With all six of these, one could track the entire existence of an object, from before it was made (its virtual representation), through its manufacture, its ownership history, its physical location, until its eventual obsolescence and breaking-down back into raw material to be used for new instantiations of objects. If recorded, the lifetime of the object can be archived, and searched for.

Spimes are not, defined merely by these six technologies; it is, rather, that if these technologies converge within the manufacturing process… then spimes could indeed arise.