SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/129115
Total Interactivity No Longer Just Science Fiction Fantasy by Ewan Spence 28 SXSWORLD / MARCH MUSIC 2013 Not every element of the Internet of Things is built equally, Scott Jenson spoke at SXSW Interactive this year about how he can see three "tribes" in the Internet of Things, and how they interact with themselves and each other. The "Bears" are the big computers: your laptops, desktops, servers and such. Smartphones, tablets, and their ilk are "Bats" (focused smart devices), while the "Bees" are the small objects with tiny digital tags on them. These can be anything from all the orange highlighter pens in your house, to razor blades on a supermarket shelf, and beyond. He also highlighted one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the ubiquity of an Internet of Things: lock-in. Looking at how we interact online, email is a fascinating area. Not because of what it does, but how it does it. Disparate systems all talk with each other with different clients on different devices, all joined together, like an Internet of addresses. Compare this to Facebook's messaging system, which is a central system where you are forced through a specific set of clients to talk to another person, all under the control of one company. There are advantages to both, but in the long run email is a far more robust way to transport messages around the world. The Internet of Things needs to be as open and welcoming as email and not siloed behind the open (but lockable) doors of a large company. That is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing proponents of the Internet of Things as we move through the second decade of the 21st Century. Meeting this challenge will take time, but when you look around the world of technology, the evidence of growth of this great network can already be seen. Sony's latest Android handsets come with NFC tags that can be stuck to objects and locations for the handset to interact with; season tickets on public transport are powered by NFC chips requiring no physical contact with barriers or readers; and the move to IPv6 in the addressing space gives humanity the ability to physically assign a unique address ... to everything. How about one final prediction? In a few years time, when we think we have caught up with the promises from 2013, Sterling will again take to the stage with one of his favorite ideas. Except then it will probably be about how we can make the world a better place with this wonderful new resource that connects everything. Whatever the answer, in part it will be driven by the Internet of Things. ■ GERRY HARDY I n March 2006, during a talk at The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Bruce Sterling returned to one of his favorite ideas: if every object in the world can be uniquely identified in a machine readable way, communicating what it is to other objects and the outside world ... what would this "Internet of Things" mean for the human race? Fast forward to 2013, where Sterling is delivering the SXSW Interactive Closing Remarks, and the Internet of Things seems to be more tangible than ever before. Originally conceived by Adam Baumgarten in 1998, the Internet of Things has evolved over the last 14 years, as new technology presents better ways of implementing the sensors and communications between the various things. Perhaps this is one of the issues that makes the Internet of Things such a blue-sky issue to many. It has been talked about so often that it has started to feel like the next Apple product. "Don't bother with the iPad Mini just now," people say. "There will be a retina-screened version just around the corner. Wait for that one." Unlike 2006 though, where the concept of this mesh of objects was the only way to approach the issue, Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011 2013 is all about the prototypes and proving this great science-fiction idea can actually work in the modern world. For example, take a smartphone from 2006 and compare it with the smartphone in your pocket. While the seven year-old handset was able to make a data connection and had a one or two megapixel camera, it was primarily a telephone that happened to be mobile. Now, your modern smartphone is brimming with sensors. It can take pictures and videos at HD broadcast quality, knows where it is in the world through GPS and can tell where it is pointing through accelerometers. It can also communicate at high speeds over 4G LTE over long range. For a local connection, you have Wi-Fi. Bluetooth allows device-to-device communication, and we are starting to see near field communication, allowing passive sensors to communicate with reading devices. Looking back at the early definitions of how the Internet of Things would work, every object would be uniquely identified, every object would understand its place in the world, and every object would communicate with each other. The hardware needs to shrink a few orders of magnitude (and NFC technology needs a few more iterations to mature), but we now have the building blocks in place to not just tag everything in the physical world, but to make sense of it.