for example, measure someone's pulse by shooting a video of him and capturing the way blood is flowing across his face...... the primary application will be for remote medical diagnostics, but it could be used to detect any small motion, so that it might let, for example, structural engineers measure the way wind makes a building sway or deform slightly..... it can just take standard video, from just about any device, and then process it in a way that finds this hidden information in the signal
Technology Review: The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything: using ultra-low-power computing, consider the wireless no-battery sensors ..... These sensors harvest energy from stray television and radio signals and transmit data from a weather station to an indoor display every five seconds. They use so little power (50 microwatts, on average) that they don't need any other power source. ..... and that means an explosion of available data ..... "nanodata," or customized fine-grained data describing in detail the characteristics of individuals, transactions, and information flows .... if a modern-day MacBook Air operated at the energy efficiency of computers from 1991, its fully charged battery would last all of 2.5 seconds ..... will help the "Internet of things" become a reality—a development with profound implications for how businesses, and society generally, will develop in the decades ahead. It will enable us to control industrial processes with more precision, to assess the results of our actions quickly and effectively, and to rapidly reinvent our institutions and business models to reflect new realities. It will also help us move toward a more experimental approach to interacting with the world: we will be able to test our assumptions with real data in real time, and modify those assumptions as reality dictates.
There are implications to the internet of things, of small sensors constantly streaming data about, say, the ecosystem. This trend is great news for devices that are much smaller than the smartphone. You are looking at pea size particles that are smart.
Pete Hartwell: Mashable: How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World: the first “Internet” looked nothing like it does today. .... we still haven’t even scratched the surface. .... connecting computers to sensors so that valuable new information can be created automatically without human data entry ..... sensors tackling our world’s largest issues: safety, security and sustainability. ..... A network of biochemical sensors can understand where and how food is being produced and stored by “smelling” it. ...... our computers are blind, deaf and numb to the world around us. We need to give them senses. ..... With billions, perhaps even trillions of sensors, we can begin to understand not just how the world is behaving, but how we are affecting it..... sensor networks are one of the principal ways we can use technology to address some of our most pressing global challenges like disease, pollution and climate change. ...... CeNSE, which stands for “Central Nervous System of the Earth” .... this is all coming sooner than you may think
This is about moving from the internet of computers and the internet of human beings to the internet of things. This includes capturing real time data from not only objects but plants and other animals as well.
This is the tool that the climate change challenge has been waiting for. We need to know what's going on. And that we is not a royal we, it is a collective we. Anybody with internet access should be able to get a detailed view of the harm being done to the earth's ecosystem. That will elevate the consciousness level of humanity, and multitudes of people will demand the right things be done, and the democratic system will deliver.
The idea of having to sit in front of a computer to access the internet has been given a slap by the smartphone, but even the smartphone makes for a weird Homo Sapien, the one that is ogling at the small screen at all uncomfortable hours.
The internet is going to liberate itself from the screen and go everywhere.
