the lecture today was given by dk arvind, who is my atelier leader, and it was very, very similar to the lecture that he gave us on the first day of the atelier.  it gives a basic overview of speckled computing and shows some examples.  it’s an ok lecture, but it’s hard to sit through it twice, especially when the internet has just begun working.  so i’m not feeling much inspiration for notetaking, but i guess it’s a good time to give a basic summary of speckled computing, which is the paradigm that we are going to be using for our design project in my atelier.
speckled computing is so named because it is about “specks” – small (down to 5mm x 5mm) chips that consist of a sensor, a processor, a battery, and a radio transmitter.  the sensor on each speck only detects one kind of thing – temperature, light, pressure, orientation, etc. – and the processor on each type of speck takes the input from the sensor, processes it according to its program, and transmits it so that it can be picked up by other specks and other computers.  the idea is to use a collection of specks, with a variety of sensors, to build a “specknet” – a network of sensing and processing power that you can distribute in the environment – building it into clothing, objects, buildings, furniture, whatever.  other computers would then have to be used to store and display the information, and to perform any processor-intensive computation, but the specks provide the means for a pervasive sensory network.
in many ways, the specks are similar to phidgets, but they are different in a few key ways:
they are smaller
they have their own small processor
they are wireless
they have networking capability
these differences are potentially very exciting, because they allow for applications where the specks can transmit data among themselves in response to environmental stimuli (a chain of specks could light up to point the way through a building or along a street, for instance), and they also allow for the networks to be trained according to neural net algorithms.
the specks themselves, right now, are still at an early stage of development.

the cool factor of vangelis’s glove
the interplay between experimentation and design

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 7:17 am and is filed under notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.