Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [79]
For our purposes, the main point of interest of the current-generation IP—version 4—is that it is running out of room. Addresses in IPv4 may be 32 bits long, and the largest number of discrete addresses that it will ever be possible to express in 32 bits turns out to be a little over four billion. This sounds like a comfortably large address space, until you consider that each discrete node of digital functionality ("host") you want to be able to send and receive traffic over the network requires its own address.
The exponential growth of the Internet in all the years since scientists first started sending each other e-mail, and particularly the spike in global traffic following the introduction of the World Wide Web, have swallowed up all of the numeric addresses provided for in the original protocol, many years before its designers thought such a thing possible. It's as if, while building a new settlement in a vast desert, you had somehow begun to run out of street numbers—you can see limitless room for expansion all around you, but it's become practically impossible to build even a single new house because you would no longer be able to distinguish it from all of its neighbors.
This scarcity is one of the stated justifications behind promulgating a new version of IP, version 6. By virtue of extending the length of individual addresses in IPv6 to a generous 128 bits, the address space thus evoked becomes a staggering 2128 discrete hosts—roughly equivalent to a number that starts with the numeral 3 and continues for 38 zeroes. That works out to 6.5 x 1023 for every square meter on the surface of the planet. (One commentary on the specification dryly suggests that this "should suffice for the foreseeable future.")
What this means above all is that we no longer need to be parsimonious with IP addresses. They can be broadcast promiscuously, tossed into the world by the bucketload, without diminishing or restricting other possibilities in the slightest. There are quite enough IPv6 addresses that every shoe and stop sign and door and bookshelf and pill in the world can have one of its own, if not several.
The significance of IPv6 to our story is simply that it's a necessary piece of the puzzle—if the role of sufficiently capacious addressing scheme wasn't filled by this particular specification, it would have to be by something else. But everyware needs a framework that provides arbitrarily for the communication of anything with anything else, and IPv6 fills that requirement admirably.
Thesis 62
The necessary display technologies already exist.
Although many—perhaps even the majority of—deployments of everyware will by their nature not require display screens of the conventional sort, there will still be a general requirement for the graphic presentation of information.
With displays of various sorts appearing in an ever greater number of places throughout the environment, though, we can assume that the ethic of calmness we've discussed in other contexts will also inform their design. And this turns out to have a lot to do with screen luminance and resolution, threshold values of which must be reached before the display itself fades from awareness—before, that is, you feel like you're simply working on a document and not on a representation of a document.
With the commercial introduction of Sony's LIBRIÉ e-book reader in early 2004, display screens would appear to have effectively surmounted the perceptual hurdles associated with such transparency of experience: In reading text on them, you're no more conscious of the fact that you're using a screen than you would ordinarily be aware that you're reading words from a printed page.
The LIBRIÉ, a collaboration of Sony, Philips Electronics' Emerging Display Technology unit, and startup E Ink, is a relatively low-cost, mass-market