A user looking at the screen can see the temperature in every room, or the foot traffic in any given area, or even the location of the ball on our smart Ping-Pong table.ĭoppelLab can do much more than visualize data. At the Media Lab, for example, DoppelLab collects data from sensors throughout the building and displays the results on a computer screen in real time. Working with the game engine Unity 3D, we have developed an application called DoppelLab that takes streams of data collected by sensors placed throughout an environment and renders the information in graphic form, overlaying it on an architectural computer-aided design (CAD) model of the building.
#EXTRA SENSORY PERCEPTION MEANING SOFTWARE#
So far the best tool for developing such a browser is the video game engine-the same software that lets millions of players interact with one another in vivid, ever changing three-dimensional environments. Just as browsers like Netscape gave us access to the mass of data contained on the Internet, so will software browsers enable us to make sense of the flood of sensor data that is on the way. Media Lab has been working for years on ways to translate information gathered by networks of sensors into the language of human perception. Yet there is a silver lining to this abundance of data, as long as we can learn to use it properly. As the amount of information about the world explodes, we find ourselves less able to remain present in that world. It is no surprise, then, that we are stuck in an information bottleneck. We perceive the world using all our senses, but we digest most digital data through tiny two-dimensional screens on mobile devices. When sensors are everywhere-and when the information they gather can be grafted onto human perception in new ways-where do our senses stop? What will “presence” mean when we can funnel our perception freely across time, space and scale? In the 1960s communications theorist Marshall McLuhan spoke of electronic media, mainly television, becoming an extension of the human nervous system. Fortunately, media theory can serve as a guide. Predicting what ubiquitous computing and sensor data will mean for daily life is as difficult as predicting 30 years ago how the Internet would change the world. The next wave of billion-dollar tech companies will be context aggregators, who will assemble the sensor information around us into a new generation of applications. But innovation will explode once ubiquitous sensor data become freely available across devices. We see the beginnings of this change with smartphone applications such as Google Maps and Twitter and the huge enterprises that have emerged around them. Instead we suspect it will be a revolutionary phase shift much like the arrival of the World Wide Web. We doubt the transition to ubiquitous computing will be incremental. When that happens, we will enter the long-predicted era of ubiquitous computing, which Mark Weiser envisioned in this magazine a quarter of a century ago. Once we have protocols that enable devices and applications to exchange data (several contenders exist already), sensors in anything can be made available to any application. Today sensor data tend to be “siloed,” accessible by only one device for use in one specific application, such as controlling your thermostat or tracking the number of steps you take in a day.Įliminate these silos, and computing and communications will change in profound ways. Yet most of these data are invisible to us. The amount of information this vast network of sensors generates is staggering-almost incomprehensible. Thanks to progress in microelectronics design as well as management of energy and the electromagnetic spectrum, a microchip that costs less than a dollar can now link an array of sensors to a low-power wireless communications network. Meanwhile, as you might have heard, network connectivity has exploded. A few decades ago the gyroscopes and accelerometers that are now in every smartphone were bulky and expensive, limited to applications such as spacecraft and missile guidance. Sensors have become abundant because they have, for the most part, followed Moore's law: they just keep getting smaller, cheaper and more powerful. If you work in a modern office building or live in a newly renovated house, you are constantly in the presence of sensors that measure motion, temperature and humidity. GPS sensors and gyroscopes in your smartphone. There are cameras and microphones in your computer. Here's a fun experiment: Try counting the electronic sensors surrounding you right now.
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