Well actually not your car today, but your car in the next decade. At least this seems clear if you consider that the Google self driving car consumes 750MB of data per second! That is the volume of data provided by all sensors equipping the car and providing the bases for the on board computers to navigate a urban environment.

What Google Car sees…

The car is equipped with a number of cameras that feed the on board computer. Is that a ball rolling out between those two parked cars? Watch out! There might be a kid running after the ball…

In the picture above (credit: Google) there is a spatial representation of the model developed by the on board computers as the car is making a left turn. All pictures are composed into a 3D model containing the size and potential behaviour of any object. A tree occupies a given space but it stays where it is, whilst a truck can move and occupy a different space and it is better that such a space does not overlap with the one that will be occupied by the car!
So, it is not enough to see, the car has to understand and speculate…

And doing this requires an amazing amount of data and of data crunching. Just think about hundreds of cars munching data and exchanging them (one car cannot see behind a corner, or a bend, but can radio its 3D understanding of the surrounding space to any other car in the vicinity). That is real broadband!

In the last few years we’ve witnessed a progressing migration of “intelligence” towards the edges of the networks, i.e. towards the Users. Advance in processing and communication technologies (e.g.: higher and higher performance, miniaturization and cost reductions) is already bringing a proliferation of devices, embedding communications and computing, which , in the near future, will be more and more deployed in the environment we live.  In less than a decade, the edge of current infrastructures will become a distributed processing, storage and communication environment made of virtual resources (operated by a multitude of Players, not just Network Operators or OTTs). This transformation will create an ICT fabric capable of interconnecting people, machines and things, where services will be created and accessed through “everything”.

We are going beyond the Internet of Things or Machine to Machine as basically we are transforming “everything” in the ambient we live in a network node, by embedding not processing, storage and communications capabilities, but also a nervous behavior. These networks of networks of edge nodes will be connected to the traditional infrastructures so to expand traditional Telco-ICT networks towards the edge. A web of heterogeneous connections will capillary cover the ambient in which we live. 

We know from biology that spatially continuous networks with heterogeneous connections are ubiquitous in biological living systems, which naturally exhibit self-adaptation and self-control features, empowered by a capillary nervous system. Actually, in living organisms, body and nervous system are adapted to natural environments on many time scales, from evolution to development and learning: any individual organism brings is particular history of behavior and stimulation to any situation in which cognition is acted out. Considering the nervous system, each nervous cell is a very simple autonomous entity but, through the interactions of hundreds of billions of them, body is controlled and intelligence emerge.

The same will be for the future ICT networks: in this metaphor the body will be a dynamical set of physical networks and the nervous system will be a distributed overlay of cognitive software; both will adapt to the service environments, from evolution to development and learning: any dynamic network will bring is particular history of behavior and stimulation to any situation in which its artificial cognition is acted out. This network nervous system will be created by an overlay network of “nervous components” embedded into “everything”, from objects, edge nodes up to core nodes: you may see it as a very capillary management system of a highly pervasive network.

Imagine the impact of transforming each object into an entity that can communicate, that can allow you accessing every services and that is aware of the environment: it will create a huge number of new biz opportunities to be exploited. A Manufacturer or a Consumer electronics Provider would have the chance of transforming their products into means to provide services, and even to remain in contact with the User of the product.

If you think that I’m dreaming, have a look at this link, there is a nice example. The idea they have is creating mathematical models of the way the nervous system and the brain work, so to build products that behave more like animals.

 We are not that far from having a technology capable of developing an artificial nervous system for future ICT networks and services.

We too are active in this field, thanks to the EIT Activity “Smart Networks at the Edge”!

Graphic image used in the Technology Review article

This is what a Technology Review article is reporting! After several years of progress in both devices and software, several attempts in marketing applications we are now seeing a number of practical applications targeting the mass  market.

Augmented reality started several years ago, over 15 years ago to be exact, as a way to help professionals in tough situations, be that an airplane engine repair in some remote location with AR providing assistance to the local engineer, or as an help to a surgeon during surgery. In 2009 the first mass market apps (Yelp, Layar…) to float information on the images captured by a smartphone camera. Interesting the one that allowed you to translate road signs on the move just by pointing your phone camera to the sentence (Word Lens).

More recently, thanks to more powerful smart phones and to better wireless connectivity, apps have begun to exploit image recognition capabilities and also to share information with other phones. Crowd Optics, as an example, has shown a way to look with your cell phone at a distant part of a NASCAR racing circuit to get photos taken by people in that part of the circuit, like having a personal cameraman at your fingertips to bring in images of those parts of the circuit you cannot see from your location.

This and other examples are provided in the linked article on Technology Review.

What I like to point out, though, is that all these steps improving augmented reality through a cell phones are but the beginning of the Internet WITH Things!

We will get used to expect that any “thing” around us is loaded with information and services, and that we can get at those just by pointing our smart phones to it. And, of course, this is just the beginning. Other ways to support interaction will be wearing glasses that embeds video display capabilities (Google glasses?) and screens embedded in the Thing itself.

More down the lane we (you) might have a chip embedded in the retina… a bit scaring though.

The more I browse the Internet the more amazed I am. Take as an example the Ninja Blocks.

A Ninja Block

These are smart objects that can be easily programmed to perform a certain task, like switch on the light is the baby starts to cry in the crib or send an alarm and take a picture if someone is taking something from your desk drawer.

They can connect to the internet and programming them is a matter of a few clicks, most of the time downloading a set of actions someone else has already programmed. This is because they use Arduino, an open source electronic board used by hobbyists.

The way to program these devices is based on ifttt (if this then that), an intuitive way of accomplishing actions on the internet (if you are not familiar with this approach take a look at the website and start doing your own programming in a few seconds). So, this is the second amazing thing: the fact that creating complex sets of actions has become very very easy!

And then there is a third amazement. The idea of creating NinjaBlocks (the inventor is Mark Wotton) required (as all ideas) some capital money to be transformed into reality. How do you get seed money? Well, on the Internet, of course!

He put the request for seed money on Kickstarter in January and within 72 hours he managed to get is 24,000$ funding sought. By the end of the campaign, on March 10th, he got 103,000$!

Kickstarter is a new way to fund and follow creativity, as they announce it on their website. You go there and you see what ideas are available and you decide what you want to fund. This is what Kickstarter says about itself:

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

Each and every project is the independent creation of someone like you. Projects are big and small, serious and whimsical, traditional and experimental. They’re inspiring, entertaining and unbelievably diverse. We hope you agree… Welcome to Kickstarter!

Don’t you find all this amazing? I surely do. There is no more excuse not to build up your own future!

GPS systems, ever more present in smart phones, can pinpoint our location within a few meters and this is really a good precision fitting most needs.
Now one of the companies that develop GPS chips for smartphones, Broadcom, has announced a new chip that is able to integrate signals arriving from the GPS with those arriving from base stations and from WiFi areas. More than this. The chip integrate signals arriving from accelerometers and gyroscope adding even more data to the localization process. It is interesting to note that there is a growing database of localization information (like where is a certain wifi hot spot) and this information is readily available to application developers. Companies like Skyhook have created a business out of this information.

The outcome? A localization that can pinpoint your cell phone within a few centimeters!

This is just amazing. Now, if you are willing to share this information, shops can tell exactly were you are and quite possibly what you are looking at. The same would go for museums that will be able to relate your position to a specific specimen and provide you with related information.

This is just another way for increasing your possibility to interface with the world and to create a seamless continuum between atoms and bits. Here we are not talking about a potential future, we are talking about a technology that is available today and that very likely will end up in our hands in a very short time.

One of the thousands images on Google glass project...

Last week most newspapers, and the web, got flooded with the news of the Google glass project. There are also some nice clips on YouTube you have probably already seen. So there is no need to post such a “old” news.

What I am interested in discussing is whether this is the sort of future interfaces we are looking for. On the web there have been many posts, some arguing that moving from a “concept” to a real thing is a big step, some saying that such technology will never really work (except that it already does..), some pointing out that the guy in the clip has some social relation problems… And of course there are also enthusiastic posts saying here is the future.

Personally, I think that the future will, as in the past, place the technology in the background, where you don’t see it and where you take for granted (naturally) what it delivers.

I am pretty sure that we are moving towards a seamless continuum between atoms and bits but bits cannot intrude, as well as atoms should not intrude when I focus on bits. It may become possible in some science fiction future to have all newborns with an implanted chip to “augment” the retina, but I personally think it will remain science fiction and not because technology won’t become available. We already have all the technology needed for electronically tagging ourselves, but only a marginal few have done that. So it is not, and it will be not a matter of technology availability.

I would consider much likelier to use our cell phone (or our cuffs for that matter) to explore the boundaries between atoms and bits. I can buy that in a few year most of us will be “naturally” using their cell phone as a magnifier lens to look at the bottle in front of them to see the information associated to it or look at a window through the cell phone screen to get info and pick up that info about an object displayed in the window.

Having a continuous overlapping of bits and atoms through the sort of glasses that Google has shown doesn’t ring true to me.