The world of mobile sensors

I've been sharing around a white paper by Nokia that considers the mobile phone as a sensor. The key point:

As mobile device subscriptions pass the four billion mark, we’re looking at
the world’s most distributed and pervasive sensing instrument. Thanks to an increasing number of built-in sensors—ambient light, orientation, acoustical, video, velocity, GPS—each device can capture, classify, and transmit many types
of data with exceptional granularity. The perfect platform for sensing the world
is already in our hands.

Well, here's a cool example, from OpenSpime, WideNoise is an iPhone application that uses the microphone on the iPhone to measure environmental noise. These geo-tagged reports can then be used to create a noise map.

Rewind a bit, 'Spime' is an abbreviate of 'space' + 'time'. A Spime is defined by OpenSpime as: a technologically enabled device that interacts both with the physical and the digital environment, aware of its location and with an history about itself. OpenSpime is working to create a Jabber/XMPP protocol that allows Spimes to report information about themselves, and has a set of python libraries in development as a first project.

A handful of threads that really are woven together...

Techno-travels and HASTAC Part II

In brief, here's a demo of a physical/virtual mashup. In this case, UbiSense tracking is used on individuals within a space called the Social Computing Room, and depicted within a virtual representation of the same space.

One can think of a ton of ways to take this sort of thing. There are many examples of using the virtual world as a control panel for real-world devices and sensors, such as the Eolus One project. How can this idea be applied to communication between people, for social applications, etc. What sort of person-to-person interactions between persons in the SCR and remote visitors are possible? I have this idea that virtual visitors would fly in and view the actual SCR from a video wall. Then they could fly through the wall (through the looking glass) to see and communicate with the virtual people as they are arranged in the room. A fun thing we'll using as a demo at HASTAC.

Virtual SunSPOT controlled by a real SunSPOT

Pardon the zapruder-like quality to this film, but this shows the hack I mentioned in my last post. I'm in SecondLife, controlling a virtual SunSPOT from a real one. In this case, tapping into the 3D accellerometer to pick up the xyz rotation, sending it through my framework to rotate the virtual one. It's a bit laggy, and not 100 percent there, but enough to get the idea.

If I ever find the time, the next cool example would be to implement the ectoplasmic bouncing ball demo using one real and one virtual SPOT. Anyhow, it works. The point really is to learn about the SPOT, and why not do something interesting while testing them...?