TransDanubeNetworked objects sprouting everywhere
Networked objects are sprouting everywhere: a brand new class of things is going to become pervasive in our lifes and environments. We are not facing with a simple shift of meaning, form or design. They are no more simple artifacts, machines, products or usual technological devices. They have nothing to do with aseptic and virtual ambients.
They share the same physicality of our world and participate to the representation of the environmental conditions by data. They can react to them with consequent actions, according to the ways they were made for. As they share same contexts, code and communication channels with human beings they can even participate to the global semiosphere construction, some small nodes of informations that flow on the networks adding granular meaning.
Networked objects are the basic infrastructure of what is named the Internet of Things. Just in the middle of Second Life and World of Warcraft-alike success, this complementary trend pushes researchers, interaction designers and media artists to investigate this field, according to the their own personal directions and sensibilities.
Things Matter. The world does, we simply don’t care to virtual environments that can basically just replicate what’s around in our first life.
After the deep exploitation of the world made of bits, a step back should be done, restarting from the world made of atoms. Networked objects are there, just in the middle of the two worlds, just as a true definition of media. They merge together bits and atoms, they create new significants to be added to the environment knowledge and ways to interact with it. A new relation between human and objects is ready to be taken out.
A world with weak controls on production activity and resources maintenance must care directly to the environment quality and goods lifespan. Ecology, secycling, sustainability, ambient environment should not anymore considered such as hype words of some activist.
So, what is a networked object? There are several definitions available on the Web, as many as the researchers and authors that wrote papers about it: Spimes, Blogjects, Internet of things, Pervasive computing, "Things that think", Everywares, Ambient intelligence, etc. According to the “Shaping Things” book author, Bruce Sterling,
“the most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story. Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process. They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects”.Several aspects emerge on what a networked object should be. In general, they should contain a unique identification system as long as they should also be fabric-made, trackable, searchable, recyclable and able to generate metadata.
After the consumer-generated media, the user-generated content, we are probably facing a new condition, it could be named an objects-generated content model. Something that can be noticed also in Julian Bleecker’s networked objects manifesto:
“The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas. Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do [...] A Blogject can start a conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is going to get some trackback”The Internet of Non-Things was made by human agents, whereas in this near future condition objects partecipate as generator of meanings and part of a conversational media.
Considering their proper nature, networked objects are the result of several elements converging together. Here are some of them: TCP/IP protocol, global-positioning system, 3D modelling software, 3D printers, search engines, radio-frequency identification, wifi, bluetooth, near field communication, physical and ubiquitous computing, tangible interfaces, calm technology, locative media, environmental sensors, XML, multiplatform programming languages.
The Transdanube project
Danube is a 2800km long communication media. Its original meaning is to flow, run. It connects German’s region of Bavaria to the Black sea. As Danube is widely navigable, since hundreds of years it was used to easily transport products, to move people, to share informations. In his whole path, the Danube flows through ten different countries of Mitteleuropa and Balkans: Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. For such countries the river means a veritable media, a strong opportunity to put together their own cultures and to know the respective neighbors. Cities as Ulm, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Vukovar, Novi Sad and Belgrade share the same Danube’s water.
Transdanube is an experimental project regarding the river, his environment and the usage of new technologies with an Internet of things approach. It consists in a small size ship-alike container that flows along Danube, without any control, in a unpredictable way, just following the water currents and forces. The prototype will start his random path from Margit Szigét (Margaret Island) in Budapest. It will be just placed inside the Danube. Since that moment, it will flow sending data to the Internet as long as the batteries feed the circuits and the sunlight recharges them.
Maybe it will be stolen, or police will find it. Maybe some boat will smash it. It doesn’t matter, as ephemerality is just part of the game. It is our Danube’s version of Voyager I spaceship and we suppose that in 2020 it will stop all the transmissions towards KitchenBudapest headquarters.
Transdanube would create curiosity and apprehension around his destiny. As it proposes a sort of reality show with the river and his tiny, fragile and ephemere boat as protagonists. A reality show that, in this case, is even more real than the trashy TV ones.
A website will constantly display informations and environmental data about the place Transdanube is located during a certain moment: bits and atoms mixed together and available at one single mouseclick!
Further contents are generated thanks to Web2.0 mashups and XML web services: the simple coordinates are used to retrieve Wikipedia entries related to the surroundings, local informations, weather forecast, georeferenced pictures, maps.
The GPS data are also used in order to locate the Transdanube floating along the Danube. Or the person that picked up the boat. The location, the altitude, the speed together with the temperature, light intensity and other kind of values coming from environmental sensors are also used as a feed for some data-visualization charts.
The overall amount of collected data is then released on the website in some XML formats such as GPX, KML, environmentXML, RSS. Everyone would be able to connect to that data sources and use them as a feed resource in order to display informations or manipulate them.
According to the scheme proposed by Bruce Sterling, Transdanube can be considered as a spime as it belongs a unique identity, it is fabricated with easy find materials, it is constantly tracked by satellites, it can be googled in order to know where exactly it is. It also sends environment and physics metadata towards Internet sharing them to everyone that could be interested.
As we are talking about blogjects, another feature of Transdanube project is that, literally, the boat is able to write his own travel log. It can generate automatically text following a natural-language creation scheme that uses collected data to switch between moods, expression ranges and condition. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do. With the proceeding of time, Transdanube will progressively publish thoughts and information about his navigation. A sort of Balkan’s ELIZA.
As to the social aspects of the Transdanube project, there is the intention to involve the whole geocaching community of Balkans countries. We are pretty sure that the boat will stop somewhere, because of a rock, a tree branch, a piece of wood. As geocachers are very skilled to track and recover objects, it would be interesting create a collective participation that help Transdanube to accomplish his final mission: to reach the Black Sea and get lost in the seven seas.