Making the physical invisible

Posted: April 15th, 2009 | Author: Sermad | Filed under: Installation, Interaction, Social Media, Twitter, Web | 1 Comment »

‘The Physical Internet’ as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable ->

1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.

2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.

3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.

Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.

Tweet when you toot!

An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.

Social Networking for My Toaster

Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.

Kickbee

A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.

Botanicalls

Forget to water your plants? Wish they would tell you when they need a drink? Well they now can.

NewsAlarm – wiring in to the NYT NewsWire API

Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.

Ideal also for perking up your dog.

Tweeting Cat Door

Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.

I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.