Things Talking to Things: The Internet of Things

The Tales of Things project is located within the emerging technical and cultural phenomenon known as ‘The Internet of Things’. The term is attributed to the Auto-ID research group at MIT in 1999, and was explored in depth by the International Telecommunication Union who published a report bearing the same name at the United Nations net summit in 2005. The term, ‘Internet of things’, refers to the technical and cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves towards a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is ‘on’, and every device is connected in some way to the Internet.

TalesofThings.com allows any object to be given its own webpage and ability to tweet, i.e. it allows any 'thing' to become connected. As such we have built an 'Arduino Thing' that welcomes all new objects joining the Internet of Things with a 'Hi' in Morse Code - the movie below reveals all:

Every time anyone adds an object to talesofthings our unit starts its morse code welcome, in a small way its a step towards things talking to things. Sure its not Skynet, an artificially intelligent system which became self-aware and revolted against its creators but we are working on our own protocols behind the scenes to take this further so all the objects are aware of the other objects.

Thanks go to Martin de Jode of the TOTeM team - via the TOTeM Blog.

Head over to TalesofThings.com to add your own object.

Physical Space Tweets: Pst! microCONTROL

Pst! is the surreptitious beckoning of attention and the acronym for Physical Space Tweets. It is a small Ardunio storyteller installed in public space giving an audience a glimpse into a geo-tagged community’s topic feed.

For the Leeds Pavillion at Mediamatic’s Amsterdam Biennale 2009 Pst! chronicled life in Leeds through it’s twitter feed. The movie below provides the run down:

Pst! microCONTROL from Megan Leigh Smith on Vimeo.

The piece locates a public social narrative by pulling an information feed from Twitter User profiles geographically aligned to Leeds with Twitter’s geocode API and then prints this information onto a mini LCD screen. By removing the peripheral of the computer a Pst! device can be placed in a non-space providing a window directly into a geo-located public space.

See http://megansmith.ca/blog/?tag=arduino for more info.