Browsing the physical world – Endosymbiotic Computing

I love the possibilities of what smaller, faster and more portable technologies can off the world – how human/computer interaction will evolve and how technology augments our lives. It’s really not that far away where data and content will just be able to pass from object to object as easy as in Minority Report.

Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.

Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

Via Spime

Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?

What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?

An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.

Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.

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