.Dust

A few months ago I was intrigued by the con­cept of spime.

What is a spime?

In sim­ple words a spime is an object that is aware of his posi­tion, is able to col­lect data from the phys­i­cal world (e.g. CO2 level, noise, etc), has some sort of mem­ory to store read data, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties to send the data stored.

On the other side there should be an infra­struc­ture capa­ble of retriev­ing all the data col­lected by spimes, store it and make it avail­able to any­one who is concerned.

If we think at the def­i­n­i­tion of spime it is quite easy to think at our mobile phones as poten­tial spimes can­di­dates. Most of them are able to gather loca­tion data through their GPS sen­sor, they have mem­ory to store data and they can com­mu­ni­cate with the inter­net through their packet switch con­nec­tion.
As you can see there is only one ele­ment miss­ing in the picture:sensors. What kind of data is a stan­dard mobile phone able to col­lect from the environment?

Well, there is one obvi­ous answer: noise! All of our mobile phone have a micro­phone and they are able to cap­ture sounds from the envi­ron­ment and sam­ple them to con­vert from ana­log to dig­i­tal. Some mobile phones, like the iPhone, allow the devel­oper to have a lit­tle bit more infor­ma­tion. On the iPhone you can mea­sure the level of the sound com­ing from the micro­phone. May appli­ca­tions use this kind of tech­nol­ogy: Oca­rina, just to say one.

It seems that an iPhone may become a per­fect spime.

There comes the idea of Wide­noise. Wide­noise is an iPhone appli­ca­tions that sam­ples the noise around you, gather your loca­tion and let you send the col­lected sam­ple to the cloud. At the very same time it is able to show you a map of your area and dis­play other col­lected data, if there is one.

So your iPhone has become actu­ally a spime and, at the very same time, it is a con­sumer of data col­lected by other spimes. In some way you are mak­ing noise a social thing.

I def­i­nitely think this is one of the most inno­v­a­tive appli­ca­tions I have see on the iPhone and I had no prob­lem at all giv­ing the guys at www​.wide​tag​.com the 1.99 USD they charge for the appli­ca­tion. The appli­ca­tion has also a fan­tas­tic look and feel for the price.

Again, the mobile phone may be the per­fect spime, but with lim­i­ta­tions. Its capa­blity of col­lect­ing infor­ma­tions from the phys­i­cal world is very lim­ited. Noise, as we have seen is a great exam­ples, speed may be another one in par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion. Unfor­tu­nately you are not able to mea­sure the lev­els of CO2, or tem­per­a­ture, or level of rain. It is quite pos­si­ble that in the future may emerge from the mar­ket devices with these capabilities.

I would like to make some addi­tional considerations.

I think that the con­cept of spime is def­i­nitely social and based on col­lab­o­ra­tion from enti­ties the are not cou­pled. You sam­ple the phys­i­cal world and send the data back to the cloud using your own device and resources. Well, this is, at least, what hap­pens with Widenoise.

We have seen that the mobile phone may be the per­fect spime but it is miss­ing the hard­ware to gather data from the phys­i­cal world.

I can imag­ine sen­sors deployed in the phys­i­cal world with some sort of short range com­mu­ni­ca­tions capa­bil­ity (e.g. blue­tooth). When a mobile phone comes in range the sen­sor may ask the phone to cou­ple with him to be a tem­po­rary spime, offer­ing the sen­sor GPS loca­tion data, stor­age and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. As a user I would be happy to offer my device and a few cents of my phone bill to allow the data to be col­lect and sent.

You may find some more infor­ma­tions on the sub­ject here:

• Wide­noise. The offi­cial web site.
• Wide­tag, Inc.. The first com­pany that makes of the Inter­net of things their core busi­ness. I had the oppor­tu­nity to meet with some of the founders in the past and they are all bril­liant guys.
• The post from Lean­dro Agro’, one of the founders of Wide­tag, on the release of Widenoise.
• Open​Spime​.com and Open​Spime​.org

Related posts:

1. Stream­ing Video Right From Your Phone With QIK
2. Too Much Social
3. Friends Gen­er­ated Con­tent. What’s next?
4. Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.
5. The Fight for the Idle Screen