Networked Objects
A few Remote Display/Remote Data Projects Aug 29,2004
Window display driven by SMS messaging by IDEO TopTrack - identifies any song played at a volume loud enough to be picked up by the cell phone " target="_other">Blinkenlights - Architectural scale display using a cell phone to control display on the side of a building. The Internet Plug - a net-controlled AC relay Ceiva's net-connected picture frames Self-Healing Minefields Radio taxi-art BitTaxi - The Bureau of Inverse Technology pubished data on how to reverse-engineer interactive taxi advertising banners.
A few Space Annotation Projects Nov 23,2003
Run by ITP alum Steve Bull Tag - Wireless game in Times Square Urban Tapestries - "Public Authoring in the Wireless City" - space annotation project on a large scale.... Game of Assassin played using mobile phones HipnTasty - Wireless entertainment apoplications aimed primarily at young women Hypertag - Bluetooth/IR tags for short-range transmission to mobile phones, used to annotate spaces.
AODV - An Ad Hoc Routing Protocol Sep 15,2003
From the intro page: "The Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm is a routing protocol designed for ad hoc mobile networks.... " This could be very useful for certain types of networked objects, when spontaneous and casual connections are needed, along the lines of edström, Holmquist, Dahlberg and Ljungstrand's Ad Hoc Information Spaces, among others.
Ad Hoc Information Spaces Feb 4,2004
Ad Hoc Information Spaces - Redström, Holmquist, Dahlberg and Ljungstrand on networks formed temporarily by networked mobile devices.
Air-TiVo? Jun 2,2004
The basic premise of it is that DAB is just transmission of a digital data stream, so there's no reason you can't put a hard drive in the radio (or just a bunch of RAM) and give it the radio a buffer, so you can pause the broadcast.... Would it be possible to combine the technologies in the Bug with a frequency scanner and create a sort of super Air-TiVo, that scans the airwaves for songs you're interested in, and saves them when they're played?
Alzado.net Feb 5,2004
Alzado.net control of spotlights in a public square, operated over the net.
AmbientROOM Feb 4,2004
AmbientROOM, Hiroshi Ishii's CHI98 paper on an ambient technology project at the Tangible Media group, MIT...
Bill Buxton Articles Feb 4,2004
Less Is More (More or Less): Speculations about the Design of Computers - Bill Buxton's essay on the weaknesses of general-purpose computers, and why application-specific, networked appliances are a better idea. See also Bill Buxton's site, where all of his writings can be found.
Blinkenlights Feb 5,2004
Blinkenlights Chaos Computer Club of Berlin turned a building into a display surface. Viewers can control the display via SMS and the web.
Bluetooth Stuff Feb 13,2004
06430 TEL: 203-254-1531 FAX: 203-254-7442 www.lemosint.com sales@lemosint.com A note on the Promi SD: Jamie Allen got this from the folks at Initium: "If you want to use Promi-SD with Tx, Rx, and ground pins only, you have to disable hardware flow control feature on Promi-SD. The AT command for this is: AT+UARTCONFIG, baudrate, parity, stopbit, flow control For example, if you use 9600 bps, no parity, one stopbit, no hardware flow control, then command is AT+UARTCONFIG,9600,N,1,0 Or, you may do same job at Promi-WIN(v3b) software."
BodyNet Jun 24,2004
This IBM research article describes using the human body as a transmission element in a data network (very personal area networking), and seems to pre-date this Microsoft patent by at least four years.... Olin Shivers' 1993 presentation on bodyNets is the earliest I've found so far.
Caffeine online Feb 25,2004
When it's working, you can check it to see whether there are cold cokes in the machine.... The coff-e-mail project at Texas A&M follows in the spirit of the Trojan Room Coffee Machine.
Cobox Tunnelling Oct 2,2003
Some useful notes form Lantronix on Cobox Tunnelling (connecting two coboxes), courtesy of Liz Goodman.
ConQwest Oct 12,2004
ConQwest is a large-scale urban game in which teams race through the city searching for hidden treasure using cellphone cameras and giant inflatable animals." It's a game for mobile phones created by Ubiquity Labs (aka Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert) for Qwest.
E-Tech notes Feb 13,2004
He and his company are doing a "Wireless Roadshow to teach local technology NGOs how wireless technologies can be used to bring Internet and intranet connectivity to those parts of the world not included in the plans of the commercial telecommunications companies."... Lili covered the history of the social computing group really well, and gave great context and setup for Wallop, an environment they're working on which maps and organizes relationships between you and the people you care about, through emails, photos, shared work, and other documents.
Hacked linux firmware for Linksys Routers Oct 21,2004
Portless has a linux distribution for Linksys wireless routers. It's very limited, needless to say, but provides some interesting monitoring functions.
IWAR - the Information Warfare Aug 30,2004
IWAR - the Information Warfare site. A frightening read.
Internet0 Nov 17,2003
Internet0 is an initiative at MIT, very like the Networked Objects class at ITP, but executed on a lower level of abstraction (i.e. all the engineeering is done from scratch, rather than using commercially available embedded net solutions).
Java and Cell Phones Sep 15,2003
An article on J2ME development on OSX using the MIDP, courtesy of Mark Argo (for those allergic to acronyms: J2ME = Java 2, mobile edition, which is the reference implementation of Java for cell phones, PDA's and other limited mobile devices.... Java multimedia for J2ME is accomplished through the MM-API" New book: The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for J2ME From Shawn Van Every, some details on 3GPP and Quicktime, a standard for cell phone video?
Motohoho Jun 29,2005
Motohoho is a group of ITP alums (Michael Schneider, Kentaro Okuda, Rikayo Horimizu, Ken Haller) designing a series of interesting networked objects and furniture.
Nabaztag Mar 22,2006
It talks in response to email messages, it wiggles its ears, and it lights up.... The nifty thing: they're a product, and they're less than $100.
Natalie Jeremijenko Feb 5,2004
I don't even particularly like robots, but I love the way this project visualizes invisible information (concentrations of toxins on a given site) using a technology that has been domesticated from military and industrial use into a child's toy.... This assignment, given to her design students, has grown into an excellent source of information on how various products are made, including chemical, material, labor, and political issues involved.
Network visualizations Nov 11,2003
\A few nifty network visualizations came up recently on the ITP alumni list: Internet Traffic Report, reports traffic loads on servers around the world. Touchgraph has some intersting visualizations of google links, liveJournal, and others.
Parasitic computing is an interesting Aug 30,2004
From the site: "Parasitic computing is an example of a potential technology that could be viewed simultaneously as a threat or healthy addition to the online universe.... These protocols can be exploited to compute with the communication infrastructure, transforming the Internet into a distributed computer in which servers unwittingly perform computation on behalf of a remote node.
Public Air Quality Indicator Sep 17,2005
The public air quality indicator is a public display that indicates the quality of the air in a city. It's highly localized, and a good example of an ambient display that has some practical use. The details of its construction are online and openly available as well
RFID readers Feb 13,2004
A few RFID readers worth mentioning; A compact flash model; thanks to Chris Dugan for the link. Price: $290.00 Skyetek has some nice ones, including the: M1, which I am playing with now (pretty small), about $100 D1, a simple box, about $300.
Raffi Krikorian Mar 30,2004
Raffi Krikorian is doing a lot of interesting work related to physical computing and networked objects, and has a lot of valuable links and notes online. His mehack blog is " A weblog devoted to taking it apart, learning from it, and putting it back together again".
Random Numbers and Physical Computing May 24,2004
Your consciousness is a great leveller for the sensors that are your eyes, ears, skin, nose, and taste buds When you move a photoresistor from one room to another, your readings will be totally different, and all of a sudden, you have to re-calculate what is "average" and what constitutes the lighting change that you want.... Even when we think we're being very regular physically, we're off by a number of milliseconds each time Most of the time when you use a random function in a program, it's because you're trying to duplicate or mimic the randomness of the real world.
Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City Feb 4,2004
Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City , Anne Galloway - An attempt to bridge cultural studies, urban studies, and ubiquitous computing.
Responsive Environments Group Mar 3,2004
The Responsive environments group at MIT has done a number of interesting projects: parasitic power from shoes, various radio-connected sensors, and more.
SenseTable Feb 5,2004
SenseTable: A Wireless Object Tracking Platform for Tangible User Interfaces A paper from the MIT Media Lab: "In this paper we present a system that electromagnetically tracks the positions and orientations of multiple wireless objects on a tabletop display surface." AudioPad is an application of the senseTable that makes music based on the position of objects on a table.
Single-board computers Feb 13,2004
VIA Mini-ITX: (Thanks, Ahmi) The bass-station uses the EPIA-800 The codeck uses the EPIA-M10000 iTuner has some nice package deals in mini-ITX boards.... Soekris Engineering (Ahmi likes the net 4801) Intrinsyc makes a nice but pricey module Kontron makes a number of PC/104 boards The Gumstix computers look cute as well.
Smart Mobs Jul 9,2004
Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog dedicated to subjects stemming from his book of the same name. He and other bloggers report on various social/technology items here.
Some SMS/public art/public speech projects Feb 4,2004
Related to that, the Hellowworld project: "Send in your message, and see how it is projected by a laserbeam onto a mountain overlooking Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, onto the UN building in New York City, onto the most prominent building in downtown Mumbai or onto a 140 metre tall water fountain in Geneva.... These messages are first parsed according to a code that dictates how the music is created, and then rhythmically drive a speech synthesizer and a picture synthesizer in order to create a compelling, collaborative audiovisual performance.
TCP/IP Chip Sep 13,2003
It's actually connecting via PPP, and could presumably be interfaced to any phone with a serial port, I think, GPRS or not.... The chip itself is cheap; around $20; and needs only a few parts to work.
Talking Lights Oct 14,2004
This company sends data through household lighting systems, by modulating the AC signal that powers the lights with the data to be transmitted, so that the lights "pulse" the data at a level imperceptible to people trying to use the lights to see. Thanks to Max Whitney for the link.
Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms Feb 4,2004
Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms - Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer's paper explaining the ideas behing the Tangible Media group at MIT.
Taxonomies of networked objects; archtectural coincidence Sep 2,2003
One service they can deliver is the ability to affect other networked objects, in which case they also function as paired devices (cf home alarm systems, Alzado.net) Community Devices for example, the Lovegety.... In class, we discussed how different locations might affect the responses, as some people might not want to push "Lousy" in a very public space; how placement near the boss' office or the conference room might skew the answers; and so forth.
Techhouse Tetris Feb 5,2004
Techhouse Tetris Tetris on an architectural scale...
The Coming Age of Calm Technology Feb 4,2004
The Coming Age of Calm Technology - Marc Weiser and John seely Brown on ambient technology...
The Disappearing Computer Initiative Aug 19,2003
This one seems like a natural for folks interested in embedded networking and physical computing. From their intro page: "The mission of the initiative is to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people's lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today."
The Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project Feb 4,2004
The Stanford Interactive Workspaces Project - a large scale project to integrate collaborative software tools into all aspects of a workspace.
The Telegarden Feb 5,2004
The Telegarden This tele-robotic installation allows WWW users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants.
The Victorian Internet : the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's On-line Pioneers Feb 4,2004
Tom Standage ©1999 Walker and Co.... A well-told story about the beginnings of telecommunications.
Urban Pollution Project Sep 22,2004
The Urban Pollution Project, an addition to the Equator project, monitors airborne pollutants in a city on a very local level.... They continually scan for other bluetooth radios, e.g. in passing cell phones, and transmit the pollution levels if a connection is accepted.
Urban Research Initiative May 30,2004
The Urban Research Initiative at NYU is predicated on the fact that "The economic future of our cities will be defined by their capacity to generate, process, and distribute information." From their introduction, "Urban Researchers must understand and explain the way in which information and telecommunications technologies are transforming the cities and metropolitan areas where people live and work.
Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces Feb 4,2004
Using Digital but Physical Surrogates to Mediate Awareness, Communication and Privacy in Media Spaces - Greenberg and Kuzuoka on using physical devices to indicate a user's working state, availability to remote communication, etc....
Visitor Awareness in the Web Feb 4,2004
Visitor Awareness in the Web - Schmidt and Gellersen on using physical devices as information displays for web traffic...
Where The Action Is: Foundations of Embodied Interaction Apr 3,2005
Paul Dourish's book Where The Action Is: Foundations of Embodied Interaction is my favorite book of the moment. He does a great job explaining physical interaction design, justifying it as a practice, and detailing the consequences of that practice....
Whereify Sep 25,2003
On the one hand, I'm impressed: a watch-sized GPS unit that sends the data back to base: neat.... For one thing, the unit can be manually "locked on" by the parent, so the kid can't turn it off, and physically locked on, so the kid can't remove it.
Wifi picture frame Sep 15,2003
Wallflower is a wi-fi picture frame; an LED panel with a hard drive and a wifi card. It's similar to another networked picture frame, ceiva frames, but without a monthly charge.
Wired/Unwired: The Urban Geography of Digital Networks May 30,2004
Anthony Townsend's dissertation on urban geography and digital networks.
YBox: Konfabulator for the TV Oct 16,2006
Tarikh Korula and Josh Rooke-Ley produced the Ybox, a device that produces TV overlays from the web, using a Lantronix Xport and a Parallax Propeller. Very nice project, very simple yet useful.