*THE NEW ECOLOGY OF THINGS
*What happens when every object and space has a life of its own? What if, sitting in your closet, your old pair of shoes could talk to your new pair? What would they communicate? Suppose your sleeve could tell you about the ten different DVD players for sale at the store. What would that look like and how would you interactive with it? If you were at a party, how would the space tell you about the cool person across the room, or where the conversation about music is?
This Graduate Funded Educational Project/TDS course has the funding of legendary network computer company Sun Microsystems Laboratories, and will be taught by Graduate Media Design Program faculty member Philip van Allen, ACCD Visionary in Residence and Sci-Fi writer Bruce Sterling, and Graphic Design Chair Nik Hafermaas.
With massive RFID tagging and the deployment of smart networked sensors and wireless personal information devices, a new ecology of things is developing. Objects and spaces gain accessible, query-able, up-datable histories and meta-data, and they exchange information with each other and network servers to form a new, pervasive thing-ecology.
This complex, emergent system will arise from pyramid of integrated, pervasive technologies: RFIDs at the bottom in huge numbers providing identity and trackability; sensors at the next level up monitoring everything (water/air quality, GPS locations, efficiency, operational status, purchases, etc.); networked tiny computational systems (e.g. motes, Sun Spots) embedded in things and spaces, analyzing, collecting and passing on sensor data; personal computational devices used by people as their interface to the ecology; and back-end servers for storage and deep data-mining power, accessible everywhere.
We're running demos today!
