I believe I am coining a new phrase: Interactive Connected Reality ™
I am certainly not inventing the concept. People have been connecting things to the internet for a long time. I believe MIT or CMU had a soda machine on the internet in the early 1990s (maybe 80s?). Here are two lists maintained by an engineer at google of internet connected soda machines other internet connected machines:
* http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/coke.html
* http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/iam.html
With the recent proliferation of Arduino and other inexpensive microcontrollers, I feel that we will see more and more people connecting things to the internet.
Pachube is a great example of a service that has allowed people to easily share and use vast amounts of shared data (which is being automatically entered by devices created by every day people around the world). A very interesting and timely example is the realtime crowd-sourced radiation monitoring in Japan.
I chose Interactive as the first word of the phrase for emphasis. I really want to spend time thinking about and playing with what exactly that means. There are many permutations. Here are some:
- Real life interaction with a real thing
- Real life interaction with a real thing (that can influence an online/virtual thing)
- Real life interaction with a real thing (that can influence another connected real thing)
- Online interaction with a real thing
- Online interaction with an online/virtual thing (that can influence a real thing)
- Online observation of a real thing
- A real life thing maintaining/representing the state of an online thing or interaction
- An online/virtual thing maintaining/representing the state of an online/virtual thing or interaction
- …
This list can probably be better abstracted. I guess I have a “to do” there. Then again, perhaps someone has already done this. It sounds very user interface, and countless hours of research have already gone into that field. Maybe I can get some help or thoughts from someone who has studied UI.
Again, this entire subject is already very obvious to some, or has been explored thoroughly by others in the past, perhaps there are new variables, or a new environment. I see an inevitable and clear path to ubiquitous Interactive Connected Reality™, and I want to help make it happen.
My current task is to focus on all three words and to make fun stuff/prototypes that make it become a reality. See my following posts for more thoughts as I flush this out more.