Future Tense — Sensors

Today, inter­net tech­nol­ogy is largely seen as cen­ter­ing around the con­cept of web­sites and a few appli­ca­tions that are net­work aware. How­ever, when com­bined with Moore’s law, which dic­tates that proces­sor roughly dou­ble in speed every 24 months, and its eco­nomic corol­lary, which means that the price of proces­sor will drop along sim­i­lar lines, the lines between what could go on the net and what won’t are get­ting hazy. Today, dig­i­tal cam­eras are embed­ded in cell phones and can send pic­tures over the Inter­net. Today, cars have so much com­put­ing power that it is almost impos­si­ble to fix them with­out under­stand­ing the soft­ware. Today, sur­veil­lance cam­eras are so cheap that any­one can set up a nan­ny­cam or wire up their home with video mon­i­tor­ing equip­ment. As those devices start receiv­ing IPs, they will increas­ingly inter­face with the net­work. As they do, the line between what’s on the net and what isn’t is going to be a hard one to discern.

At the same time, Radio Fre­quency tags, aka RFIDs, are start­ing to appear in the mar­ket­place giv­ing a unique sig­na­ture to each object they are attached to. I believe that, in the future, those RFID will also include an IPv6 address, which will give them a pres­ence on the net. Your credit card, your keys, your socks will have such device embed­ded into them and you will be able to see them on the net­work as well as off it.

Bruce Ster­ling calls those types of objects spimes, and adds that they should location-aware. I could argue that they do not need to be since efforts around IPv6 are already adding locat­ing aware­ness to the mix.

When you com­bine the always-on inter­net with such devices, you enter a whole new realm of potential.

This is the fourth arti­cle in a 6 part series. You can read the fol­low­ing parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Par­tic­i­pa­tory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion