Roboflies, Flexonics, and the Social Life of Smart Dust David Pescovitz, Eric Paulos O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference 2003 Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- Cross-disciplinary research is finally enabling ubicomp. Danny Hillis story: at compsci conference in the early 70s, someone predicted that the market for PCs would be in the millions, and other laughed -- will we have computers in every doorknob? Well, this hotel does. Start with the UPC barcode. Last major innovention in shopping in meatspace. Future is endangered by new, smaller, smarter barcodes. Shelves, packaging and carts will all coordinate to reorder, bill, recommend, track condition. The keyis RFIDs -- passive silicon that stores a GUID, hit it with RF and it emits the number. Already used for security -- badges for crossing doorways; for logistics -- shipping palettes that know where/who they are. Benneton's ditched RFID plans over the potential invasion of privacy. For RFIDs to kill UPCs, they need to be dirt cheap: 0.5 cents. Semiconducting nanoparticle inks can be printed with inkjets onto cloth, paper, etc. Based on liquid gold nanocrystals. 20 atoms across, melt at 100 deg C, 10% of normal melting temp. Encapsulated in a shell, dissolved in regular ink. Inkjet printer lays down circuits using this stuff or can be screened on using traditional packaging processes. The printing burns off the capsule. Have printed transistors, will print diodes. Crude today, but good/cheap enough for RFIDs: balance tech and economics. -- Printable organic electronics Fused deposition modelling printers (FDM) -- feed it a CAD drawing and it squirts out successive layers of very thin plastic, building 3D shapes. Used in rapid prototyping. Combine with printable organic electronics and you can print electronics and packaging together. But it's missing the mechanics. Solved with dialectric elastomers, similar to muscle-wire. Produce voltage when squeezed, compress when zapped. Put them all in a single printer and it can print the casing, actuators, packaging, all together. The casing of the device is not distinct from the device -- it's all integral, of a piece. If this was on your desktop, you could download a blender and print it. P2PPP nets: P2P product plan nets. Sharing and collaborating on plans for matter. -- Smart dust: Gets interesting at milimeter scales. 100s of 1000s of tiny sensors provide hi-rez view of environment. Detect light, temp, motion. They run on an OSS operating system called TinyOS. TinyOS allows motes to self-assemble into ad-hoc nets. Motes pass info to nearest neighbors, data is bucket-brigaded to central base-station for processing. Motes only wake up to send and receive. RF eats up energy even for short hops: how do you power these? Dust, Inc. powers AA-battery sized motes for a couple years. Next gen runs off a watch-cel for 10 years. After that, solar, kinetic energy. Lots of apps, even ones that aren't scary. Keep tabs on lighting, temp and motion to create microclimates in buildings to save energy. UC Berkeley has one floor like this. Once they're small enough, you could mix 'em into paint and just paint 'em onto the walls. Used for archaeological restoration: seed crumbling castles to determine where structural integrity is compromised. Integrate with carbon nanotubes to detect pathogens in the air. Used to monitor conditions that precipitate changes in nature preserves. -- Microbots Add legs to make mobile smart-dust. Solar-powered and MEMS-based. Fabricated like integrated circuits. Add wings for a robofly. Biomimicry -- engineering based on nature. MEMS-based wings flap like flies' wings, generate lift. Still a ways off -- 2 years until they can autonomously fly. -- All this turns the world into a database we can interact with. === Eric Paulos: how this changes how we interact with each other. We use touch as nonverbal cues. Make eyecontact. It's a ping -- I saw you you saw me. How do we enable this at a distance -- Pooh and Piglet, "I just wanted to be sure of you." We need ambient mobile personal devices. SMS enables relationship-building, and the generation is mobile and experimental. Intolerant of poorly designed devices and UI. They don't use "uncool" devices. The ability to personalize your phone is as important as getting dressed. They use tech that provide social engagement. Corporate intranets are irrelevant, the important this is entertaining teenagers during boring gaps (the rest of us too). SMS is cool because it's stealthy, rapid, enables fluid identity. Japanese cellphones are inventing emogee -- pictographic heiroglyphs that are more playful than text, and have the benefit of secrecy. Connexus: mimics glancing/pinging f2f behaviour. Two people wear matching bracelets that monitor light, position and pulse, and output heat or cold on the remote side, along with LEDs and vibes to produce different sensations. Wireless connectivity, maybe GPRS soon. People are configuring their own meanings. They're paired -- there's no spam in this system. Like wedding bands. You pat your Connexus and the other side gets sensations, temp, vibe, and light ased on your semaphore. Hold onto it to xmit your pulse to the other side: xmit very personal info. [[ED: Raises the question of Turing Tests -- can you tell the difference between a human's band interaction and a software app's interaction? What about treating crazy people with this?]] Use this with context-aware gaming, tagging and message play: moblogging, gaming, etc. -- Familiar Strangers: you agree to ignore each other and agree to go on ignoring them without any implication of negativity (fellow commuters). This isnt' the absence of a relationship, but a *special form* of a relationship. Imagine that everyone is wearing motes, and at the end of your lunch, your motes output all the social cues (smells, sounds, etc). You can respond, "If I ever pass by the person whose 'tag' was sneeze, I want to reply with 'gezundheit'" Today, I can get 24 WiFi access points between my lab and my my coffee shop. These MAC addresses are spatial notifiers, I could put a note up that says, MAC address $FOO triggers this MP3, which means that my friends will hear this MP3 when they get close to Foo.