Thesis 64

The necessary bridges between atoms and bits already exist.

Like a leitmotif, one idea has been woven through this book from its very beginning, popping to the surface in many places and in many ways: The logic of everyware is total. Whether anyone consciously intended it to be this way or not, this is a technology with the potential to sweep every person, object and place in the world into its ambit.

Obviously, though, and for a variety of good reasons, not everything in the world can or should have the necessary instrumentation built into it at design time. Sometimes we'd like to account for something built before everyware was ever contemplated, whether it be a medieval manuscript or a 1970 Citroën DS; sometimes we might want to keep track of something whose nature precludes ab initio integration, like a cat, or a can of cranberry sauce, or a stand of bamboo.

So in order for the more total visions of information processing in everyday life to be fully workable, there exists a generic requirement for something that will allow all this otherwise unaugmented stuff of the physical world to exist also in the hyperspace of relational dataa bridge between the realm of atoms and that of bits.

Ideally, such bridges would be reasonably robust, would not require an onboard power supply, and could be applied to the widest possible range of things without harming them. Given the above use scenarios, a very small form factor, a low-visibility profile, or even total imperceptibility would be an advantage. Above all, the proposed bridge should be vanishingly cheapthe better to economically supply all the hundreds of billions of objects in the world with their own identifiers.

Such bridges already existand are in fact already widely deployed. We'll limit our discussion here to the two most prominent such technologies: RFID tags and two-dimensional bar-codes.

The acronym RFID simply means "radio-frequency identification," although in use it has come to connote a whole approach to low-cost, low-impact data-collection. There are two fundamental types of RFID tags, "active" and "passive"; just as you'd assume, active tags broadcast while passive tags require scanning before offering up their payload of information.

While both types of tags incorporate a chip and an antenna, passive tags do not require an onboard power supply. This allows them to be extremely cheap, small, and flexible; they can be woven into fabrics, printed onto surfaces, even slapped on in the form of stickers. Of course, this limits their range of action to short distances, no more than a few meters at the very outside, while active RFID units, supplied with their own onboard transmitter and power supply, trade greater range for a correspondingly bulkier profile.

The onboard memory chip generally encodes a unique numeric identifier and includes as well whatever other information is desired about the item of interest: part number, account number, SKU, color.... Really, the possibilities are endless. And it's this flexibility that accounts for the incredibly wide range of RFID applications we see: In everyday life, you're almost certainly already engaging RFID infrastructures, whether you're aware of it or (more likely) not.

Two-dimensional bar codes address some of the same purposes as passive RFID tags, though they require visual scanning (by a laser reader or compatible camera) to return data. While unidimensional bar-codes have seen ubiquitous public use since 1974 as the familiar Universal Product Code, they're sharply limited in terms of information density; newer 2D formats such as Semacode and QR, while perhaps lacking the aesthetic crispness of the classic varieties, allow a literally geometric expansion of the amount of data that can be encoded in a given space.

At present, one of the most interesting uses of 2D codes is when they're used as hyperlinks for the real world. Semacode stickers have been cleverly employed in this role in the Big Games designed by the New York City creative partnership area/code, where they function as markers of buried treasure, in a real-time playfield that encompasses an entire urban areabut what 2D coding looks like in daily practice can perhaps best be seen in Japan, where the QR code has been adopted as a de facto national standard.

QR codes can be found anywhere and everywhere in contemporary Japan: in a product catalogue, in the corner of a magazine ad, on the back of a business card. Snap a picture of one with the camera built into your phoneand almost all Japanese keitai are cameraphonesand the phone's browser will take you to the URL it encodes and whatever information waits there. It's simultaneously clumsy and rather clever.

Ultra-low-cost 2D-coded stickers allow what might be called the depositional annotation of the physical world, as demonstrated by the recent Semapedia project. Semapedia connects any given place with a Wikipedia page to that page, by encoding a link to the Wikipedia entry in a sticker. For example, there's a Semapedia sticker slapped up just outside Katz's Delicatessen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; shoot a picture of the sticker with a compatible cameraphone, and you're taken to the Katz's page on Wikipedia, where you can learn, among other things, precisely how much corned beef the deli serves each week.^[*]

^[*] Five thousand pounds.

The significance of technologies like RFID and 2D bar-coding is that they offer a low-impact way to "import" physical objects into the data-sphere, to endow them with an informational shadow. An avocado, on its own, is just a piece of fleshy green fruitbut an avocado whose skin has been laser-etched with a machine-readable 2D code can tell you how and under what circumstances it was grown, when it was picked, how it was shipped, who sold it to you, and when it'll need to be used by (or thrown out).

This avocado, that RFID-tagged palleteach is now relational, searchable, available to any suitable purpose or application a robust everyware can devise for it. And of course, if you're interested in literal ubiquity or anything close to it, it surely doesn't hurt that RFID tags and 2D codes are so very cheap.

Richly provisioned with such bridges between the respective worlds of things and of data, there is no reason why everyware cannot already gather the stuff of our lives into the field of its awareness.