Smart Objects

The Digiflower as an ambient display. Found on BBC News: "Technology to be showcased at the conference include a Digiflower, developed by Samsung to predict when someone is coming home from the office, blooming when they are near and wilting when they leave. "

Other digital flowers have been developed by the Human Connectedness Group at the Media Lab Europe and at BTexact. See another article on BBC news.

BTExact has a scanner for physical object to access memorabilia: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2985063.stm. No idea about the technology. Probably just a camera. How do they do the linking? Reminds me of work done by HPLabs (first seen in HUC2k).

We recently hosted a DC Atelier on our Lancaster Smart-its prototyping hardware platform from 29/07/02 to 01/08/02. The actual hardware was built on Tuesday. Everybody enjoyed soldering one or more communication boards and sensor boards. On Wednesday we split up in groups of two. Each group chose an application that involved both hardware and software development. The applications were:

• Wireless Joystick


• Singing Smart-its


• WinAmp Smart-its


• Wireless RFID Tag Reader


• Walking detector


• Ball Smart-its

The general setup consisted of a wireless sensor node broadcasting its information to a base station connected to the serial line of a PC.

More Information about the event and the platform can be found on our Wiki pages. Some pictures are available here.

See also News on Ubicomp.

These are some references related to wireless sensor networks I haven't really checked out yet:

• A Network Virtual Machine for Real-Time Coordination Services. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/nest


• Smart Messages Project


• Webdust Project. Last publication from 2001 ....