Slashdot Mirror
Browsing Reality With Sensor Networks
Roland Piquepaille writes "Welcome to the world of 'Reality Mining'! The billions of networked sensors that exist today are generating humongous streams of data. What about 'data mining' this big flow of data and discover our environment in a way that never existed before? Suddenly, sensors would look like pixels and we would start to browse reality as easily as we browse web pages today. Fascinating concept! Some fellows at Accenture Technology Labs are thinking about this and they already have designed some demos of reality mining software. Their demos include web agents, data modeling, GIS systems and much more. They also show how you could detect fires or how you would do virtual shopping. Please read their long article or this shorter summary for a couple of examples."
That is a really cool idea.
;-)
Did anyone else think of Snowcrash when they saw this? It's almost like the world of Snowcrash super-imposed on reality with all the cool stuff.
However, this is also ripe for abuse. I can think of so many people who'd want to "hack" into what you see and do weird things (make you see a fire in places where there is not).
Already, the latest JPEG exploit makes me think of hacking into a system by merely viewing an image - this would make it closer to that reality
he just takes it, then reposts it for 400$ per advert per month, nice little cashflow for copyright infringment
do you think sensormag mind him reposting their articles on his website without permission for profit ?
maybe a C&D would persuade weblogs.com to tighten up ?
Wake me when we have effective position location sensors, indoors and out, and the required beacon deployment to be useful most places.
Until then its all BS.
Data is useless without context. Position is the best context we have any hope of auto-generating.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Problem is there's no way to store that much information. You can't store information about every atom in the universe because doing so would require every atom in the universe to store it!
You'd either have to compress the data massively, or, more likely, simulate things on a much larger scale. The most recent universe-scale gravity simulations (too lazy to post a link, check slashdot history) simulate reality by using spheres the size of galaxies.
As storage density and computational power increase, or as you zoom in on a smaller area, you can increase your resolution so the granularity is better than the galaxy level.
Although this is a cool idea, it's dangerous too. You know how you get all upset with cookies and spyware? Well, this can (and probably will, sooner or later) lead to the same thing in real life. Imagine running out of milk and being bombarded with Mayfield ads everywhere you go.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and hiding will become an artform.. because no one will believe that something could actually *hide* from the sensor web... So hidden things will be very well hidden indeed once you assume that they cannot exist.
meh
Quite a few Slashdot readers think Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa is exploiting this site as a way of upping his ad impressions. There's a strong argument that he wants to turn the Slashdot effect into ad money, and this is supported by the habit he has of linking not to the article, but to a verbatim copy posted on his ad-supported blog. Engadget (ptorrone) are pretty dubious too, but at least they bother to write their own content.
/. editors, and I don't necessarily think that their submissions should be rejected. Whether they are astroturf or not is up to the individual reader to decide, and some people seem to enjoy them. What I would like to see is the ability to let the individual block submissions from particular users somehow, either as a subscription feature (block by UID / foes list), or a Firefox extension (based on NukeAnything perhaps).
Having said that, I don't think Roland etc are bribing the
And I no, I don't have the time / skillset / influence to code the above myself. I'm just putting some ideas out for discussion.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling