Ana Viseu on Wed, 20 Nov 2002 03:45:59 +0100 (CET) |
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ubiquitous computing environments (was: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes) |
[At a time when Nettimers are engaged in a discussion regarding the connections between physical and digital worlds, here goes an article (from PCWorld) with a commercial vision for one possible way of interweaving both worlds. It is far from the activist 'vision' that Geert and Florian propose, but it is one that is rather pervasive within tech development circles, and thus one that we should keep attention to. It has been emphasized by a recent speech by Bill Gates at Comdex, where he announced that Microsoft will start developing "smart personal objects" and thus moving from an emphasis on 'personal computers' to one on 'personal computing' where the digitality is hidden. (see for instance <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2487787.stm> and <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/18/technology/18GATE.html>. All the best. Ana Viseu] Future Gear: Tiny Chips, Everywhere With petite sensors and radio transmitters, every object can have an identity and even think for itself. "Objects are going to be increasingly given budgets and responsibility, so they can make their own decisions," says Paul Mackinaw of AccentureTechnology Labs. I recently visited Accenture to check out prototypes of new products and to meet Mackinaw, who has the dream job of imagining new worlds enabled by technology, then trying to build them. Accenture's vision of the future is called Reality Online. It presumes that people, products, and even clumps of dirt can have digital identities that share information over networks and use this information to make decisions. Among the many applications Accenture imagines are store shelves that know when they are out of an item and order more, crates that can tell the receiver if they've been dropped during shipment, and dirt that can sense if crops are getting too dry and turn on sprinklers. For Everything, a Chip Critical to the development of Accenture's omniscient new world is the profusion of very tiny, very inexpensive computer chips. Even today, a chip smaller than the size of a match head can hold a unique identifying number and a tiny radio transmitter. Anyone who uses an electronic security badge or card is carrying such a device. When you wave your card by the reader, a radio signal energizes the chip, allowing it to transmit a unique ID number back to the reader. If your number is in a database of people allowed to enter, the door is unlocked. Small enough to fit in a credit card, the chips are extremely cheap: They cost about 17 cents apiece. Accenture envisions putting them on everything from car parts to shampoo bottles. And the tags wouldn't have to hold much data. The Auto-ID Center, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is proposing a 96-bit key as sufficient to develop enough unique identifiers for all the products on the planet. (By comparison, a 56-bit key could identify every grain of rice on earth, according to Accenture's Mackinaw.) With the transmitter chips in place, a company could track each product as it moves through a factory. Shippers would know what items--and how many of them--are in every crate or container, and stores would know if they are receiving what they've ordered. When customers hit the checkout counter, they could simply pass their cart by a radio receiver that would register every item and tally the bill. That's certainly neat, but other applications are downright creepy. In Accenture's world, the tags stay on after you buy a product. If you are strutting down the street in your fancy new shoes, for example, a passerby with a radio receiver-equipped PDA could find out the brand. You could no longer pass off your cheap loafers as Prada. (Unless, perhaps, the vendor also creates forged ID chips.) Mackinaw demonstrated this with a table of tagged products--books, a tie, and a scarf--and a Handspring Visor with a radio receiver. In his example, the Visor checked an onboard database of just a few product ID numbers. But in the future, he envisions the PDA linked wirelessly to databases containing the universe of ID numbers. With sensors in place, Accenture also imagines everyone turning into a salesperson. Got a new purse your friend likes? Don't just tell her the brand. Make sure she scans your purse so you get a commission from the retailer. You might foil the system by yanking out the sensors. Accenture also envisions a system that would allow you to specify that the IDs on your shoes are confidential. But if we're already having trouble getting spam filters to work, what are the chances of mastering access privileges to our clothing? What about embedding chips inside people? It's certainly possible, says Mackinaw, but he sees their placement in plastic cards as more likely. The Nth Sense Putting an ID number on a chip is just the beginning. Researchers are already building chips with sensors that can read conditions like temperature, vibration, or moisture. In one of the simpler applications, car brake pads might have sensors to warn you if they are getting thin. They could even communicate with a Web-connected onboard computer that schedules a trip to the mechanic. How would your car find a convenient time for the appointment? If you set up the service, the car's computer could access your online calendar. Just like a brake pad or a bottle of shampoo, you, too, could be tracked online. In much larger applications, thousands or millions of sensors strewn about would automatically combine into networks. The University of California at Berkeley has already shrunk these sensors down to about 12 cubic millimeters, which is smaller than Lincoln's head on a penny. The sensors could be commercially available in about two years. The ultimate goal is to approximate a grain of sand, creating a type of sensor called Smart Dust. Mackinaw says we may see such chips in about five years. These minuscule sensors could be spread over a farm field to measure crop conditions and order extra water or fertilizer if needed. They could even be mixed in with paint to signal when it starts peeling. Too small to contain batteries, they would draw power from heat or sunlight to produce a signal just strong enough to reach the next chip. Together, the dust would form a peer-to-peer network to aggregate data and pass it on to a receiver. Reality Offline In theory, all this can come to pass. We have the technology, or we will shortly. In practice, we'll probably see some implementations of it. Electronically tracking certain products--especially expensive items like TVs or computers--makes sense. And large companies with sufficient budgets to hire qualified technicians can make it possible. We already use lasers to read UPC symbols, so why not add radio IDs that provide still more detailed information? But I wonder how big a role consumers would want to play. Although most people would appreciate a dashboard warning before their brakes become dangerous, would many of us agree to grant the brake pads access to our online calendars? Would many people even bother to have an online calendar, and keep it up to date? And how likely are customers to use PDAs for tracking products that move through the world? Most PDA users engage only its most basic functions, and just synchronizing data is a challenge for some. Will those people see radio receivers and subscriptions to product-tracking databases as killer apps? And even if they do, will all the manufacturers and retailers agree on an interlocking database network, delivered as a Web service, to track billions, even trillions, of items? I suspect that, for the foreseeable future, your Prada secret is safe. http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,106403,00.asp Sean Captain PCWorld.com October 30, 2002 [ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ] Tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena. http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~aviseu http://privacy.openflows.org [ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ] # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net