Roboflies Flexonics, and the Social Life of Smart Dust David Pescovitz Writer in Residence, UC Berkeley College of Engineering http://www.pesco.net/ Eric Paulos Research Scientist, Intel Research Laboratory at Berkeley http://www.paulos.net/ 2003-04-25 **************************** Pescovitz: The first WiR at UC BCoE. Writes an online research digest each month, Labnotes, about what's happening there. Seeing a lot of electrical engineers, etc, hanging out with biologists, sociologists, political policy maers etc, to solve many different long-term problems. This cross-disciplinary approach is making pervasive computing become more ubiquitous. There are computers "in every doorknob" (eg, hotels), all around us. The UPC barcode is the last major change in bricks and mortar shopping. Future of the barcode is "looking pretty grim." Will be replaced with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags that notice when you leave the store with items and charge you accordingly, keeping track of stock, etc. Already used on security badges, stock management on pallets. Benetton recently ordered [large number] of tags. Printable Organic Electronics. Ink jet printer squirts out this material Flexonics - Devices on-demand. 3-D printers (FDM?). Organic Electronics. Combine with 3-d printers - you can "print" the packaging and code together. Novel Actuators. Combine all three together in one machine and it can construct an entire device, "print" it. Peer-to-peer product plant networks - people can share product designs, print them. This will all get cheaper and more ubiquitous. Smart dust Self-assembling networks for: * Environmental monitoring * Smart buildings * Structural monitoring * Defense Tiny OS, each mote passes information to the next mote, data passing through the network. They're not awake all the time, only when they need to be. How do you power these? They're available now, but bigger than they need to be, from Dust Inc. Could be powered from solar power, or by vibrations - kinetic energy from the vibrations in a building. Can monitor the environment. When they're really small they could be mixed in paint, put on the walls to monitor the surroundings. Greg B? will put motes on the Golden Gate to measure stability. Combine with carbon nanotubes to detect tiny amounts of a pathogen in the air. Microrobots * MEMS based * Self-powered * Autonomous [Showed a little movie of one 1cm long, but it was hard to make out what it was doing. Trying to walk apparently.] Robofly R. Fearing at UC Berkeley. Taken 3 years to get a small (inch long?) robot that flies. Muscle is difficult. They use foil stainless steel. Paulos: [Encourages everyone to contact him for a chat.] He looks at how we react in the world away from technology. People touch each other; hold hands, arms around each other. Eye contact, glancing round a room. "Pinging" people to say "I saw you here, I'm here." What about when we're apart? Piglet to Winnie the Pooh: "I just wanted to be sure of you." The tools we use now. Shows a graph with "Richness" up the y axis, "Disruptive/Ambient" along the x axis. [Missed where technologies lie on the graph. Cell text messaging was bottom right.] Young people are early adopters. Keep in touch and build relationships. Highly social and experimental. Mobile (once they have a license). Intolerant of poor devices, value fun factor, coolness is important. If you think you're cool - go and talk to teenagers. You're square! Teens (13-18) have Discman/Walkman, phone, gameboy, laptop, pda (in order of preference). Young adults (19-24) have phone, discman, laptop, pda, gameboy. They like stealth/non-disruptive technologies. Rapid dissemintation to large groups of friends. They can be anonymous. Physical Transcendence. He shows an example of pictograph messaging from umoji(?) phone/messaging. Japanese characters mixed with icons. People create their own languages around new tools. Shows photos of tech tools being developed: comTouch (MIT), inTouch (MIT), Phone Bracelet (PaPR), Telephonic Arm Wrestling (White), Scent (Royal College of Art), Heart 2 Heart (Stanford),... Connexus Sensing and Actuation. Two people exchange something like a friendship band/bracelet. One person's feels things like blood pulsing, light, force. Other person feels pressure, sees LEDs in response. Suggests he could tap his device to indicate he's waiting for his girlfriend, she feels a pressure. Making up their own language. [Question: Can you wear several for several girlfriends?] Context Aware Gaming, Tagging & Message Play Convergance of gaming, multimodal games, mobile blogging, moible phone, online gaming. Making people more aware of what's going on around them. Digital Patina Graffiti, stickers, vandalism, damage, etc on items is interacting with the community. Personalising. How else can this be done? Familiar Stranger Someone who is obsevered, repeatedly, without any interaction. eg, someone you see while commuting every day. You have a communal agreement to ignore each other without it being hostile. Imagine that everyone is wearing tiny devices. You pick up the "scent" of people as you walk around. When you get back to the office you pick up the sounds, feelings etc that these people wanted to put out. Say you hear a sneeze... you could program your device to output "gezundheit" in response next time. Game: take an object, action and theme, eg Newspaper, Hopscotch, Guilty Pleasure. People get together in an area and do things using these. People vote on who did the best "thing." [Can't hear the question :( ] Somthing about "bidding" in relationships and that women usually do the majority of bidding... Question: About how you could choose to only meet people with similar opinions to yourself, not really a good thing. -------------------------------------- -Print out a blender ? - millimeter scale for interesting applications such as Smart dust, K.Pister at UC. Self assembling networks contains wireless transceiver. TinyOS allows ad-hoc networking , nodes wake up just to send and receive data (bluetooth passive ?). - Launch of Dust inc. called motes about the size of AA batteries - Motes can scavenge energy from vibration - www.dust-inc.com - Possible to mix them up in paint and paint them on a wall - Seismic sensors $1 to $2 each - Deployed in Masada to determine why its crumblingfor seismic upgrades - Motes on GG bridge to measuer stability - Carbon nano-tubes as sensors, use to detect pathogens Mobile smart dust - few centimeters long, like ICs, solar powered - ---------------------------- Social aspects of technology - Awareness cues (pinging) associated with physical contact Generation Txt -- Never heard that one before. **************************** Enter email address below to be sent a copy of this. jmay@pobox.com richard_gayle@excite.com allen@hutchison.org pshah@sxip.com etcon@crystalflame.net (this and all hydra documents) tim@lauer.com **************************** External References: David Pescovits, http://www.pesco.net Eric Paulos, http://www.paulos.net http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/index.html http://www-device.eecs.berkeley.edu/~viveks/ http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfc/ (Flexonics Slide) http://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/~warneke/SmartDust/index.html (Smart Dust Slide) Dust Inc. @ http://www.dust-inc.com Business 2.0 Article on Dust, Inc. http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,47164,00.html http://www-bsac.EECS.Berkeley.edu/~shollar/microrobotics/microbotics.html (Microrobot slide) http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/06/fearing/home.html (Robofly Slide) http://www.ubicomp.org ****************************