The Internet of Things - What is a Spime? 141
CoolVibe writes "From the abstract in the talk: "World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and 'searchabiliity' to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth." It's a very interesting lecture given by Bruce Sterling about something we might see in the near future. The lecture can be viewed here on Google Video."
Reverse (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone is watching (Score:2, Interesting)
Great idea!! -- Awesome technology!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not soon, if ever (Score:3, Interesting)
Real Use Cases (Score:3, Interesting)
Now couple this with ubiquitous eletronic mapping of your home and the buildings you spend your day in.
Your Dinner Plates Are Trackable
It's time to do dishes. You have a glass and a small plate at your family computer from that snack you ate while reading the news after work. You have two glasses on the coffee table and one on the sofa from the guests you had over last night. Your son has three plates, a bowl, flatware, and a few glasses up in his room. You left a drinking glass on the washroom counter.
But you don't know that they are there yet! Sure, you could walk into the family room and look around and pick up any you see, but you can do better. Open up your mobile, direct the interface to show the location of all diningware in your home. Now filter that to exclude diningware not already in the kitchen. How do you do that? I don't know, maybe it's as direct as typing "diningware +home -kitchen" into a prompt. But however you do it, now you see on your mobile a layout of your home with red dots indicating the location of diningware you need to round up to wash.
Your Refrigerator Is Queryable
Only it isn't that clunky Refrigerator of the Future you saw in that magazine article.
You're at the grocery store. You're out of milk, low on soy sauce, and out of eggs. But you can only remember the eggs! Open up your mobile. Query "groceries +refrigerator +out" to get a list of groceries that belong in your refrigerator that you are out of: "1. milk, 2. eggs". How does it know what you are out of? After all, if you are out of it, it isn't there. AI? Of course not. It gives a list of groceries that have recently been in your refrigerator but aren't now.
But wait, what about the soy sauce? Well, it's still there, so your query for things you are out of didn't catch it. How can it know you are low on it? Does the soy sauce bottle have a amount remaining meter that can be read? Of course not, let's be realistic! What you did is designate to your fridge when you set it up that the bottom door-shelf is for things you are running low on. You put the soy sauce bottle there last night after the meal to be sure you'd remember - or rather so it would remember - and your fridge has rfid scanners with sufficient granularity to know what is on this shelf. So you rewrite your query: "groceries +refrigerator +out +low" and you get "1. milk, 2. eggs, 3. soy sauce". Aha! Soy sauce, that's what you were missing. Because you configured your fridge like this when you set it up, when you query "low" in the context of "refrigerator" that's becomes an alias for "top left shelf".
Your house would have more rfid scanners than electrical outlets. And everything from a carton of milk to your cat's collar would have an rfid tag.
Other good examples once you make these assumptions? 1) Tracking locations of projectors, televisions, and media carts in the office or school. 2) Tracking locations of books in a library. 813.11A. Where the heck is that? Instead of asking the librarian or following signs through the winding maze of shelves until you find 800xxx, just query it in your mobile and it will show you exactly where it is in the electronically mapped library. Just walk over and pick it up.