I recently attended the
Conversation: The Internet Of Things & Augmented Reality - Convergence Conversation discussion / brain-storm meeting on the implications of '
Internet of Things'.
There are several companies and groups that are now focussing on this - one of the best examples of it being
Pachube. There is no doubt that there are massive gains to opening up communication channels between various 'active' objects. Applications lie in several domains: energy, environment, SCM, reactive systems, so on and so forth.
Personally, I expect two primary variations of this:
Closed Systems: where organizations control their own silo of communication channels and devices. Example: yellow cab state and position monitored by a central monitoring system in the yellow cab company. Encrypted channels, and everything that comes with closed environments. This is already happening, btw.
Open Systems: this is the interesting bit - imagine being able to predict earthquakes (through resources like
LISS, for instance) and tweeting it out. Or collision detection in traffic. Or reactive rooms, environments.
Post the meetup, I decided to chalk out the underlying architectural implications for an
open web of highly communicative systems, with the goal of opening up thinking around some issues that are bound to come about:
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Unifying the communication language: we know about microformats and how long they have been in the pipeline. Especially for open systems that provide data feed, this is essential.
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Handling data explosion that comes with Real Time systems - take the case of twitter, for instance. The scalability challenges they have faced are widely known. And this is when they aren't doing any semantics yet.
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Creating Relevance: as data explodes in volume, applications need to figure out a way to crunch and filter out the noise. There is a google right there in the making.
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Smart usable applications: while you could create an application that makes your 'car keys' searchable by the public, you wouldn't do that now, would you? Technology is not the biggest problem, creativity is.
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Data presentation: interface is the king. With the volume of data, it becomes imperative that the interface / application is able to understand the deeper chaotic nuances of a 'state-based' system, and make intelligent interfaces out of it.
One of the key idea that Kit Macgillivray of Real Time Project discussed was the concept of gazillion agents do one simple task, and yet, as a collaborative system, appears very smart.
I will be posting more on this later.
Breach Candy Group (BCG) specializes in the use of future media technologies for commercial, social and artistic purposes. Our objective is the research, development and artistic exploration of these technologies as well as helping organizations and institutions innovate on their products, strategies and services.