The Physical Web | Pervasive Memory | Digital Sensors | Social Influence
Digital sensors make even dumb things act smart.
When we talk about sensors, we mean everything from microphones and cameras to the dozens of different devices commonly categorized as sensors. Most of them are now being leveraged to let devices – and companies – behave more intelligently. (Click on the tree to see what we mean.)
Today, sensors can measure just about anything. Some measure pressure changes, others the presence of a chemical, and others changes in temperature. Sensors used to be largely present in factories and automated settings, but in recent years they have proliferated everywhere. Sensors went digital, shrank in size, and their power needs are shrinking – which makes them more versatile. Some sensors can now harvest energy from the environment – such as from vibrations in a bridge – to enable uses where replacing a battery would be difficult or impossible.
(Here are links to huge amounts of information about sensors.)
Kinect is the first wave of digital sensors, unleashed
Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 shipped 10 million units during its first four months on the market. “You are the controller” announces Microsoft’s ads, since Kinect learns to recognize each game player and uses your words and motions to control each game.
David Pogue, tech guru of The New York Times, wrote:
It has four microphones and three little lenses: a video camera, an infrared projector and a distance sensor. Together, these lenses determine where you are in the room. And not just you. The system tracks 48 parts of your body in three-dimensional space. It doesn’t just know where your hand is, like the Wii. No, the Kinect tracks the motion of your head, hands, torso, waist, knees, feet and so on….
It doesn’t merely recognize that someone is there; it recognizes your face and body. In some games, you can jump in to take a buddy’s place; the game instantly notices the change and signs you in under your own name. If you leave the room, it pauses the game automatically.
Sensors will drive wave after wave of innovation
Kinect is a wonderful example how sensors can both drive innovation and change customer expectations. It will force companies in other industries to jettison controllers and develop products that can behave as intelligently as Kinect (dumber than a video game is not a effective long-term corporate strategy.) Within days, an Open Kinect group formed online and individuals started collaborating to develop open source code and strategies for hacking Kinect’s capabilities.
Sensors are spreading into virtually everything, from our digital devices to things we don’t think of as being digital devices — like clothing and walls. This flood of innovation will change industries.
For example, UBM Techinsights recently warned the consumer medical device industry that:
The core elements of many personal medical devices – including processors, displays, memory, keyboard/data-entry methods, battery power, connectivity methods, speaker/headphones, and sensors – are being found increasingly in smartphones. Driven by apps, video, and gaming, smartphones have also become more sophisticated, boasting greater processing power and better sensors.
As a result, electronics designers can now deliver valuable medical device functionality at a lower marginal cost through integration with smartphones. Lower prices to consumers who already possess smartphones increase the addressable market for integrated products as compared to more expensive, stand-alone medical devices.
Increasingly, smart customers can tap into sensor networks that used to be available mainly through large, established firms who were often using proprietary systems.
Sensors are already everywhere
These days, a wind sensor on a buoy outside of your town can tell you whether it’s worth driving five miles to take your sailboat out or to go wind surfing. (It can also tell you whether the wind is increasing so much that you might want to tie down the furniture in your back yard.) You can determine this from your own house or while on a business trip 3,000 miles away.
With apologies for this very long sentence designed to make an obvious point about their countless applications, sensors can… monitor your tire pressure and avoid dangerous blowouts; analyze the gait of elderly citizens and warn of falls before they occur; follow the gaze of shoppers and identify which products they examine – but don’t buy – in a store; monitor which pages readers of a magazine read, or skip; float in the air over a factory and independently monitor the plant’s emissions; detect impacts in the helmet of an athlete and make it impossible for them to hide potential serious blows to their brains; reveal when a dishwasher, refrigerator, computer, bridge or dam is about to fail; trigger a different promotion as a different customer walks by a message board; analyze the duration and quality of your sleep; warn drivers that they are about to fall asleep; prevent intoxicated drivers from operating a motor vehicle; warn a person before he or she has a heart attack; detect wasted energy in both homes and commercial buildings; warn a parent or boss when anger if creeping into their voice, to help prevent them from saying or doing things they will later regret; tell waiting customers how far away the pizza delivery guy is from your house; analyze the movements of employees through a factory, to detect wasted time and efforts; trigger product demonstrations or interactive manuals when a customer picks up or examines a product; congratulate an athlete when she swings a tennis racquet properly or achieves an efficient stride while running.
Digital sensors go hand in glove with pervasive memory because each one of these sensors generates data in databases. We used to think about digital technologies basically being computers, but now we recognize that it also includes a much broader range of devices that include digital sensors, and every camera, and every microphone or recording device. We are burying sensors in our gardens, embedded them in our bridges and roads; they are floating on the seas and sometimes in the air. They are being used in warfare and research. Each creates more data, more information, and more opportunities for innovation.
New business models will change your industry
Sensors create spectacular opportunities to introduce products and services that were not even conceivable 10 years ago and now are both possible and practical. A retail store could recognize and greet customers as they enter the store; not a clerk, mind you – the store itself. That same store can monitor the paths shoppers take through the store, learning to adjust displays and product placements to maximize sales.
Let’s say this again, because it’s pretty important: a physical store can be just as smart or smarter than a web site. So can an office building, or a car dealer’s showroom. We don’t think today of bricks and mortal buildings as possessing this sort of intelligence, but with each passing day there are fewer reasons why not.
In our homes and offices, we will be able to talk and/or gesture to the objects around us. The road there may be bumpy, but everything around us is going to get smarter.
Everything.
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