Michigan Researchers Working on Smart Dust Prototypes, Dubbed “Micro Motes”
The next generation of computers will be able to carry out complex calculations but will be little bigger than a snowflake.
Such tiny computers – nicknamed smart dust – would work much like their larger cousins, says Prabal Dutta at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They will have tiny CPUs that run programs on a skeleton operating system and be able to access equally small banks of RAM and flash memory.
The plan is for such sensor-packed machines to be embedded in buildings and objects in their hundreds or even thousands, providing constant updates on the world around us.
Dutta’s group is creating the first prototypes, which they have dubbed Michigan Micro Motes. These devices, a cubic millimetre in size, come equipped with sensors to monitor temperature or movement, say, and can send data via radio waves.
…Like microscopic Robinson Crusoes, the motes will live off the power they can scavenge from their surroundings. A mote near a light source might use a tiny solar panel, while a mote running somewhere with greater temperature extremes can be built to tap into that, by converting the heat energy that flows between hot and cold into electricity.
So what will be smart dust’s killer app? The Michigan team says Micro Motes could be used to monitor every tiny movement of large structures like bridges or skyscrapers. And motes in a smart house could report back on lighting, temperature, carbon monoxide levels and occupancy. With motes embedded in all of your belongings it might be possible to run a Google search in the physical world. For example, asking Google “where are my keys?” would give you the right answer if they have been fitted with a mote.
(via Smart dust computers are no bigger than a snowflake - tech - 26 April 2013 - New Scientist)
$5 Sensor Uses Ambient Electro Magnetic Interference to Turn your TV into a Touch Screen
…the electricity running through the wires in your house has a unique electromagnetic signature. There is the “carrier wave,” provided by the power company and your nearby substation, and then every single kink and switch along the way modulates the EM signature until it is quite unique.
What most people don’t realize, though, is that every device that is plugged into a wall outlet also changes your EM signature. Your TV doesn’t just suck power from your house — it’s a two-way street, with the electronic components in the TV producing interference that change your house’s EM signature.
Now, by plugging an EMI sensor into any wall socket, you can read your house’s EM signature — and if you continue to listen, you can detect changes in the signature. Obvious changes occur when a device is switched on or off, but it also turns out that simply moving your hand close to an LCD monitor also alters your house’s EM signature.
…Using that $5 sensor, which is attached to a PC running some clever software, the University of Washington researchers are able to discern between five different gestures: full-hand touch, five-finger touch, hovering above the screen, pushing, and pulling.
…The average detection rate is 96.4%; it would be higher, but the hard-to-detect hover and push gestures drag it down (the EMI caused by a hand placed a few inches away from an LCD monitor is almost infinitesimal).
Two years ago, the same research group used the same technology to turn CFL bulbs into proximity sensors.
(via Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor | ExtremeTech)
What socially beneficial uses can you think of for a billion loosely coupled, low power microprocessors and their associated sensors? Because in 20 years time, buying and deploying such a network will be cheap enough for city planners to consider it routine.
The logical end-point of Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law is a computer for every square metre of land area on this planet — within our lifetimes. And, speaking as a science fiction writer, trying to get my head around the implications of this technology for our lives is giving me a headache.
We’ve lived through the personal computing revolution, and the internet, and now the advent of convergent wireless devices — smartphones and tablets. Ubiquitous programmable sensors will, I think, be the next big step, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their impact is as big as all the earlier computing technologies combined.
The Future of Robotics: Fast Cheap and Out of Control
Much as the computing industry progressed from a mainframe to a PC to a mobile stage, with each stage marking bigger improvements in computing power while shrinking in size, the robotics industry could be headed for the same trajectory. What this means is the day is coming soon when each of us could have teams of personal robots that follow us around in our daily lives, doing everything from cleaning our toilets to cleaning our arteries, and communicating with each other as part of swarm intelligence. That’s a radical idea, but no more radical an idea than that one day each of us would have a personal computer. Remember the skeptics who once doubted why anyone would ever purchase a personal computer.
(via The Robotic Future is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control | Endless Innovation | Big Think)
$35 Computer Goes on Sale in Two Weeks:
In the future, this will be looked back on as an important milestone.
The first set of Raspberry Pi computers will be available for $35 on February 20, reports Ars Technica.
The computer (pictured right) is a barebones device in every sense — you’ll have to supply your own monitor and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but after that you’ve got a feisty Linux-powered device with internals comparable to a smartphone.
(via You Can Buy The Raspberry Pi Computer For $35 This Month)
Invoked Computing: When Everything is an Interface, Who Needs Interfaces?
Lead researcher Alexis Zerroug explains:
In this project we explore… a ubiquitous intelligence capable of discovering and instantiating affordances suggested by human beings (as mimicked actions and scenarios involving objects and drawings).
Miming will prompt the ubiquitous computing environment to “condense” on the real object, by supplementing it with artificial affordances through common AR techniques. An example: taking a banana and bringing it closer to the ear. The gesture is clear enough: directional microphones and parametric speakers hidden in the room would make the banana function as a real handset on the spot. (…)
To “invoke” an application, the user just needs to mimic a specific scenario. The system will try to recognize the suggested affordance and instantiate the represented function through AR techniques (another example: to invoke a laptop computer, the user could take a pizza box, open it and “tape” on its surface).
(via Turn Pizza Boxes Into Computer Interfaces With “Invoked Computing” (Video) | TechCrunch)
