Bring on the Spimes
08/05/2008
What would happen if you knew where everything was? Or if even the most insignificant items were gifted with rudimentary communication skills? Or if the history of everything was logged and stored in a way you could access from anywhere in the world?
These were some of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past week, ever since I found out that there are several projects out there that could help make these things happen. More about them in a second, but first, and explanation of how I got there.
It all started back at the Over the Air conference. Chatting to some of the other delegates, we were imagining what a ’smart’ name badge would do, and I envisioned it changing colour or displaying a message as you approached other delegates based on how your interests synced. As to how it would do it, I thought of using an embedded computing device such as the Arduino, plus wireless communication via Bluetooth.
Now this is all very plausible, but has the huge downside of cost: a setup like that would cost well over £50 per person, which, if you had hundreds of delegates, could get very very expensive. Then somebody told me about the OpenBeacon project, and I realised I’d got it all wrong.
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OpenBeacon turns this idea on its head: the name badge itself does not do any computation: all it is is an RFID tag, with simple input and output (a button, a buzzer and an LED). Unlike your simple Oyster-card -style RFID, the OpenBeacon variety is ‘active’: this means that battery-power can boost the range at which it can be detected to tens of metres. Once this is coupled with lots of base-stations to detect the tags, you can use triangulation to pin-point the exact position of every person.
This has been used successfully at the Chaos Communication Congress as you can see from these videos.
So there you have it. The objects are still dumb, but they are no longer mute. You can then process and display the information on any device you like: consult your mobile phone or your laptop during an event to physically locate all the people with similar interests, for example.
If all of this sounds a bit Orwellian: you’re right. However, it all depends on who has access to the information, and how much you choose to disclose. If you yourself can get at the data, then I can imagine it being very useful. For example, you could ask the system ‘give me a list of all the people I talked to at that conference I went to two years ago’. (in practice, the exact query would have to be more like ‘get me a list of all the people who remained within a two metre radius of me for more than 5 consecutive minutes’, but you get the idea).
Equally, and potentially more relevant to the museum world, you could lend each visitor to your gallery an OpenBeacon badge, and then they could use their mobile to read extra information about the object they are standing next to without having to type in any IDs nor scan QR codes. You could also use their location data to build up a list of all the works they visited (which they could later see on a personalised website, for example), or even get them to ‘bookmark’ particular items by pressing a button when they are in front of them.
With large scale data like this, you also start entering the realm of scientists who look at bee pollination behaviour (or, more prosaically, marketers who look at web site usage statistics): individual events are not particularly significant, but when they are aggregated you can start to infer useful conclusions.
I also found some other projects with similar goals (mainly thanks to Tinker.it’s blog). The Roomware project includes open source code to track items using RFID or Bluetooth, and TimeLines is a company that specifically uses technology like this to allow participants to interact during and after events.
Meanwhile, the Pachube project takes things a whole step further, by aiming to monitor any type of object, in any location. Pachube (pronounced ‘patch bay’ apparently), is the brainchild of ambient artist Usman Haque, and allows objects to upload information about themselves to a central location using Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML). Read more about it at www.pachube.com.
Once you’ve got a client-server architecture like this, the sky’s the limit. You can have your house communicate with you via twitter, or check your energy usage from anywhere.
And so, finally, we get to the idea of a Spime, which is a neologism coined by Bruce Sterling. According to his speech at SIGGRAPH 2004:
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.
Sound familiar? All of the things mentioned above seem like proto-spimes to me. And monitoring and logging projects like Pachube, SENSEI and OpenSpime are taking us a step closer.
Bring it on.
P.S. If you’re interested in the technology to get up and running with your proto-spimes, there is a free RFID and Arduino workshop as part of the mini Takeaway Festival at the Science Museum’s Dana centre next Tuesday and Wednesday.



