Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [21]
We'll also see garments with embedded circuitry allowing them to change their physical characteristics in response to external signals. The North Face's MET5 jacket takes perhaps the simplest approach, offering the wearer a controller for the grid of microscopic conductive fibers that carry heat through the garment. But more than one high-profile consumer fashion brand is currently developing clothing whose fibers actually alter their loft, and therefore their insulation profile, when signaled. When coupled to a household management system, this gives us shirts and pants that get more or less insulating, warmer or cooler, depending on the momentary temperature in the room.
Finally, there are a number of products in development that treat the clothed body as a display surface, the garment itself as a site of mediation. The U.S. Army, again, is experimenting with electro-optical camouflage for its next-generation battle dress, which suggests some interesting possibilities for clothing, from animated logos to "prints" that can be updated with the passing seasons. (Real-world approximations of the identity-dissimulating "scramble suits," so memorably imagined by Philip K. Dick in his 1972 A Scanner Darkly, are another potential byproduct.)
Considered in isolation, these projects—from toilet to eyetap, from "body area network" to running shoe—are clearly of varying degrees of interest, practicality and utility. But in the end, everything connects. Taken together, they present a clear picture of where we're headed: a world in which the body has been decisively reimagined as a site of networked computation.
Thesis 13
Everyware acts at the scale of the room.
If even the body is subject to colonization by ubiquitous computing, the same is certainly true of the places we spend most of our time in and relate to most readily: architectural spaces of room scale.
As we've seen, most of the early experiments in ubicomp focused on the office environment, and supported the activities that people typically do there. But many aspects of these investigations were applicable to other kinds of spaces and pursuits as well, with processing deployed in features that most rooms have in common: walls, doorways, furniture, and floors.
If you want to provide services to people as they roam freely through a space, it's quite important to know exactly where they are and get some idea of what they might be doing. If their identities have not already been mediated by some other mechanism, it's also useful to be able to differentiate between them. So one strong current of development has concerned the floor beneath our feet, quite literally the perfect platform for sensors able to relay such information.
As far back as 1997, the Olivetti and Oracle Research Lab at the University of Cambridge had developed a prototype Active Floor, which monitored both weight distribution and the time variation of loads. Georgia Tech's Smart Floor followed, improving on Active Floor not least by its attempt to identify users by their "footfall signature," while the University of Florida's Gator Tech Smart House uses flooring throughout with impact sensors capable of detecting falls and reporting them to emergency services.
Two current strains of thinking about smart flooring are represented by very different projects announced within the last year. On one hand, we have NTT DoCoMo's CarpetLAN prototype, which uses weak electrical fields to afford both wireless networking and positioning accurate down to about one meter of resolution. CarpetLAN bears all the marks of a highly sophisticated effort to understand what kinds of functionality can be practically subsumed in a floor.
And then there is inventor Leo Fernekes' Sensacell capacitive sensor grid system,