Serendipitor from mark shepard on Vimeo.
Sentient City Survival Kit - Quick Start Guide from mark shepard on Vimeo.
The app enables users to submit own findings and post these to the map. Additions to Boskoi will be reviewed by an editorial board, considering toxicity, pollution and endangered or rare species. Findings can be reported on the website or through the beta app for Android phones. The team has set up some rules though to respect nature, ownership and health: (1) be friendly (ask permission if ownership is unclear), (2) be generous (how much do you really need? Leave most for others), (3) be alert (beware of toxicity and do not tread on other plants when picking), and (4) be careful (only add locations that are robust and can survive limited foraging).
Boskoi is a project by the Amsterdam-based foragers of Urban Edibles, initiated by research and design collective FoAM and supported by Urbanibalism and Pollinize. The app is based on Ushahidi, an open source platform for mobile phones that people in crisis situations use to report what happens. The app was built for the post-election crisis in Kenya in 2008. Ushahidi was also used to map the catastrophe in Haiti and the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. For Boskoi “report an incident” is changed to “report a find”. The app aims to highlight what is growing and living in our daily environment as it stresses the quality of the eco system close to the city. The makers of the app found out that the diversity of plants in The Netherlands is higher in the urban than in rural areas. The idea of Boskoi is to develop new networks between people and their living environment through ‘augmented foraging’.
In several countries online mapping networks regarding freely available fruits and vegetables are already running, for instance the Urbana-Champaign Fruit Map. To combine the data collected by all of these ‘sidewalk harvesting’ projects, the initiators of Boskoi are planning to create a ‘Forage Markup Language’ in order to make the knowledge available to everyone. Another future innovation could be a culinary plug-in with special recipes.
Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo.
Niche focused, technology restricted (Silverlight required) and expecting a lot of effort from participants… all strategically sound based on a clear understanding of the audience and the subject matter.
Provides a really good example how we can integrate digital technology with the offline environment to influence and motivate real people to do real things in the real world. Which in this case are then tied back to further interactions in the online experience, then back offline, then online, etc ,etc … fantastic. Just wish i liked Jay-Z then i'd be into it!
Droga5 New York goes all out in its launch of Jay-Z's upcoming memoir Decoded with a massive multiplatform campaign that takes every page of the book and brings it back to its birthplace, literally. The book, published out of Random House imprint Spiegel and Grau, is set to release on November 16. Until then, the campaign will recreate each book page on a traditional outdoor, or not so conventional space—think billboard, the lining of a suit, or bottom of a pool—all of it relevant to where the contents of each page originally took place.
"We've made canvases out of some pretty extraordinary places," says Droga5 Creative Chairman David Droga. "We've turned everything into outdoor—350 pages are outdoor and another 100 and 150 are things that money can't buy." The latter will involve some familiar other big names, which at press time Droga could not disclose. "A lot of other big global brands and icons have stepped up to turn themselves into canvases," he says.
"We're trying to do something that's consistent with the Jay-Z brand," Droga explains. "He does all these incredibly bold things in the music industry. He wants to do the same thing to the publishing industry. What's bolder than putting every single page of your book out in the real world, so if someone wanted to read it or discover it, they don't have to buy the book? He's so confident that the story's compelling, the reader will get so caught up in looking at this that they'll want to buy the book."
But fans need not be as jet-setting as Jay-Z to see each execution. A partnership with Bing maps gives the audience a chance to search for each page online via a scavenger hunt, which will provide daily clues to each of the various page locations. "I'd seen that Bing maps presentation from TED, which was extraordinary, and thought, Imagine if we could lay that over the top and suddenly you've got something that's global," says Droga. "You could be sitting in Arkansas and you could walk in the streets of Brooklyn." The agency had been in talks over the last year and a half with Bing to do a nontraditional promotion and finally found an opportunity when the book project came up.
The thrill of the search and book pages aren't the game's only rewards, however. The First players to find a page get a hard copy of the book with that page signed by the artist himself, and all will get thrown into a draw for the grand prize, a ticket to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in concert on New Year's in Vegas.
Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit.
SCVNGR
Rght now, that should be a lot of people. Every six months or so, a set of features sweeps across the Web and every site and app feels the pressure to adopt it. We’ve seen this with social, geo, and now game mechanics. Of course, all games on the Web have some sort of game mechanics—those elements of game play which make them fun and addictive. But game mechanics are spreading to all kinds of apps, most famously Foursquare (which makes you check into places for badges and rewards). At our Social Currency CrunchUp in July, we had a panel which explored how game mechanics are invading everything. (One of the CEOs on the panel was SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch). Every site from Mint to the Huffington Post now has some sort of game mechanics.
SCVNGR’s playdeck tries to break down the game mechanics into their constituent parts. Some elements are as basic as “achievements,” “status,” and “virtual items.” But there are also more complex ones such as the “appointment dynamic” (a player must return at a specific time and perform an action to get a reward, like in Farmville), “free lunch” (a player gets something because of the efforts of other people,like in Groupon), “fun once, fun always” (a simple action that maintains a minimum level of enjoyment no matter how many times you do it, like Foursquare’s check-ins), and “cascading information theory (give out information in the smallest dribblets possible to keep players guessing and moving forward). SCVNGR employees are instructed to memorize the flash cards. Now you can too. There will be a quiz.
Guide To This Document: This list is a collection of game dynamics terms, game dynamics theories that are interesting, useful and potentially applicable to your work here at SCVNGR. Many of them have clear applications within the SCVNGR game layer (progression dynamic, actualization), many of them don’t… yet (status, virtual items). Many of them are just interesting for your general education on game dynamics theory (epic meaning, social fabric of games). Many of these game dynamics concepts are well known and are sourced from all over the internet and from researchers such as Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost and Jess Schell and articles on gamasutra (which I highly recommend reading). Others are used exclusively internally here and won’t make any sense outside of HQ. Along with a link to this document, you will have received these dynamics in a set of flash cards. Please memorize those. If you’re on the engineering / game-design team you can access our internal game dynamics visualizer (with the most up to date dynamics) through your account. Download the SCVNGR app for iPhone& Android (if you haven’t already) and start playing. Find places where these game dynamics exist or places where you could implement them by building on the game layer using our tools, or others.
Definition: A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. These are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.
Example: a badge, a level, a reward, points, really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.
Definition: A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dyanmics.
Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.
Definition: The act of inducing player behavior not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.
Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.
Definition: The theory defining how behavior can shift greatly based on changed expectations.
Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)
Definition: The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.
Example: From Jesse Schell’s awesome Dice talk
Definition: The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimized as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.
Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk
Definition: The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
Example: showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.
Definition: the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.
Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.
Definition: The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.
Example: DARPA balloon challenge, the cottage industries that appear around McDonalds monopoly to find “Boardwalk”
Definition: Games that can be played across multiple platforms
Example: Games that be played on iphone, facebook, xbox with completely seamless cross platform gameplay.
Definition: The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
Example: 10 orcs block your path
Definition: The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.
Example: Bejeweled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels
Definition: This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.
Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.
Definition: a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioral shift
Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps
Definition: Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.
Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content)
Definition: The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.
Example: my friend has this item and I want it!
Definition: players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.
Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk where she discusses Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.
Definition: Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioral momentum.
Example: killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up
Definition: Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.
Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared
Definition: A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.
Example: kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge
Definition: A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.
Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it for cheap. There is no sketchiness b/c you recognize work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.
Definition: The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.
Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.
Definition: Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.
Example: wait N minutes, collect rent
Definition: A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.
Example: many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.
Definition: The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.
Example: fealty in WOW, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favorite customers)
Definition: a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total gameplaying audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.
Example: hidden questions / achievements within world of warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests
Definition: The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.
Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetizer
Definition: An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.
Example: A X2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.
Definition: The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.
Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell
Definition: The act of controlling something, having it be *your* property.
Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.
Definition: the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment
Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.
Definition: The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).
Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).
Definition: a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.
Example: a progress bar, leveling up from paladin level 1 to paladin level 60
Definition: Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.
Example: kill 10 orcs, get a power up.
Definition: Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.
Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed causes ambiguity which can incent more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.
Definition: The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
Example: receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.
Definition: The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs
Definition: the timeframe and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.
Example: getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville
Definition: A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.
Example: top scorer deals, mayor deals
Definition: a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.
Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling
Definition: the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.
Example: From Jane McGonicgal’s TED talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.
Definition: The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.
Example: white paladin level 20 in WOW.
Definition: Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
Example: From Jane McGonical’s TED talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.
Definition: Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.
Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realizing that.
Definition: A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is acheived.
Example: kill something like 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge
Definition: A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people)
Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in
Definition: Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.
Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges
Shopping
Supermarkets have always kept track of how people shop, but in the last few years the extent to which retailers collect data has rocketed. Tesco owns a majority stake in Dunnhumby Ltd, which carries out data mining and analysis for large group of retailers including Coca-Cola, BT, Mars, Vodafone and other leading brands. Dunnhumby operates the Tesco Clubcard scheme: using data collected from the scheme, Tesco can predict when people will shop, how they'll pay for their items and even how many calories they will consume. Dunnhumby recently reported a 32 per cent rise in operating profits to £53.4 million, and has grown from 300 employees at the start of 2007 to nearly 1,250 this year. The data collected by Dunnhumby has changed the way we shop.
Relationships
Dating site OkCupid.com runs a regular series of blog posts analysing data from the site's 3.5 million active users. By collecting user profiles and site messages, it's possible to calculate everything from the perfect profile picture (apparently, the perfect profile picture is taken on a high end camera, in the mid afternoon, without a flash) to the right language to use when replying to messages ("your" beats "ur", and "hot" is a turn-off, whereas "fascinating" is a turn-on). The data has also shown that on average, users add two inches to their height, and over-report their salary by 20 per cent. The large datasets collected by dating sites have also attracted academics, so look out for more data-based date advice in the future.
Business deliveries
In the last few years, advanced mapping tools have allowed businesses to use data to increase the efficiency of their deliveries. Where companies used to plan deliveries on paper and in small teams, they now use advanced mapping software, routing data and live traffic information. MapMechanics produces several of these tools, with its clients delivering everything from the Yellow Pages to milk. Those clients now do their deliveries using complex and live-updated views into data that used to be limited to the shift manager's desk.
Maps
The way people find shops could also be about to change, thanks to a new view into an existing set of data. Since Google introduced Street View three years ago, rival services have since appeared from the likes of Microsoft and Mapquest. Microsoft's Bing Streetside (their version of Street View) has been remixed by a group of researchers, turning it into Street Slide. Street Slide takes the data from Streetside and turns it into a strip of businesses with clickable logos and building numbers. It's a different and intuitive view into the average shopping street, and could change window browsing forever.
Education
The LA Times has been running a story based on new data that has shaken up how schools are assessed in the city. Until now, parents have used overall school test results to assess the quality of teaching at local schools, which reflects the circumstances of the parents more than it does the quality of the teaching. The LA Times obtained data on test scores from 600,000 students between 2002 and 2009, allowing it to calculate "value added" scores, or a measure of the progress students have made between different stages of education. This analysis shows that some schools have improved the academic achievement of its students at a greater rate than other, more respected schools. Although there have been questions raised about the methodology behind the analysis, it's still a great example of how new and previously unseen data can add a different perspective on a subject that affects everyone's life.
Politics
Spending data for the government is being released on a much greater scale, with the release of COINS spending data to be supplemented by itemised spending above £500 from local government. Several bodies have appeared that aim to provide a clear picture of how the Government spends money, including Where Does My Money Go?, OpenlyLocal and Armchair Auditor. Although they're operating on a relatively small scale at the moment, they've achieved a lot in a short time. It's not a stretch of the imagination to see WDMMG? achieving its ultimate goal of tracing where everybody's tax money, down to the nearest penny, has gone. The London Datastore and Data.gov.uk are campaigning for and highlighting open data releases from the Government, and the Government itself is planning a raft of data releases. With more data becoming available about how our Government operates, it'll inevitably be pressured to change.
Society
Location data has powered the creation of several major new social networks, including Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Latitude. With the addition of Facebook Places, location data could be part of the lives of an additional 400 million users. University College London's Centre for Spatial Analysis has churned out some amazing views of location data, the latest from doctoral research student Anil Bawa-Cavia. He's recently published maps which take snapshots of data from Foursquare and turn them into a view of "social London". The data shows that Shoreditch, London Fields and Covent Garden are among the most popular locations. That may say more about Foursquare's users than it does the "average Londoner", but Facebook Places will change all that. Bawa-Cavia thinks the data provided by Foursquare "can help us understand how the social lives of cities relate to their spatial structure. By analysing geo-social datasets we can hope to understand the basis for a more sociable, more usable city".
War
The Wikileaks War Diary is the most comprehensive set of data about a war ever released. Putting aside criticsm of the data (and the motivations behind its release), the information contained within the reports on civilian deaths, increased attacks on coalition troops by the Taliban and revelations of Pakistan-Taliban links has demonstrated the futility of the war more comprehensively than a decade of war reporting.
Advertising
No story about the use of data changing people's lives could omit a mention of Google. Unlike the other examples mentioned here, Google works with data in the Petabye scale, where traditional ways of organising data fall apart. Google relies on mathematical models and the input of more (and more, and more) data to increase revenue and its success. As Wired's Chris Anderson wrote two years ago, "Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right".
Linked data and the future
The examples of data mentioned in this article are innovative, exciting and life changing, but the best is yet to come. The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is "dumb", or unconnected. The next step is "linked data", or data that talks to each other. In the UK, Tim Berners-Lee and the team behind Data.gov.uk are aiming to create a linked database of Government information. By providing all data the Government produces in a linked format, individuals will be able to pull in different sets of data to produce new and innovative ways of understanding how our Government and the world works.
FluidDB, a start-up company run by Terry Jones, and with backing from Tim O'Reilly and Esther Dyson and others, is tackling this field from a different angle. FluidDB wants to create a "writeable world", where physical objects have virtual identities, which can be updated and called upon by any individual with access to the internet. That could mean tweets and status updates about everything from a brand of toothpaste to the Eiffel Tower could contribute to a collective database. The possibilities for collaboration are endless.
Billboard Magazine video instalation from Marcos Kotlhar on Vimeo.
Smell sensors are essential to the future of the Internet of Things. From RFID stickers capable of smelling food through the package and updating the food's status to the Web, to our next phone being a "smell phone", engineers are finding innovative ways to help protect our families from being exposed to toxic hazards.
Sensors that measure blood alcohol content by smelling your breath have been around since 1938 when a professor named Rolla Harger invented the Drunkometer. His success in marketing the device was due in part to his work with the National Safety Council to legislate alcohol limits - as well as legitimize his sensor data as evidence in a court of law. Today, the innovation that's occurring with these sensors is the dramatic decline in cost. So next time you want to know if you're legal to drive after you drink, you can just blow into a Mini-Key chain Breathalyser, a device that will set you back less than $10.
In Israel, Russell Berrie of the Nanotechnology Institute at Technion developed a sensor that can verify lung cancer by smelling a patient's breath. The sensor searches 42 different lung cancer biomarkers, and is built out of nine cross-reactive chemiresistors. These resistors are built out of gold nanoparticles, each with different organic functionalities. A similar sensor from the same institute can be used to detect kidney disease sooner than traditional urine tests can. The research for that particular sensor system is titled Sniffing Chronic Renal Failure in Rat Model by an Array of Random Networks of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.
Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at U.C. San Diego is working with startup Rhevision to develop a smelling device that will attach to your cell phone. The system is based on a camera that takes a picture of porous silicon. Each of these microscopic pores are individually shaped, or tuned, to change color when a specific chemical is encountered. Thanks to the current megapixel resolution of today's phone cameras you can take a single picture of these pores, or sensors, and load it to the Web where it can be analyzed in real time. One application would be that these smell phones could rapidly map out chemical spills and other exposure threats.
General Electric is currently testing RFID-configured smell sensors. These small stickers can not only detect the presence of hazardous waste, they can also detect and report food spoilage. One example is a milk carton with an RFID sticker attached to the outside. The sticker periodically smells the milk through the packaging, and as soon as the milk goes bad the RFID sends a wireless alert.
Ion Mobility Spectrometry machines are currently the most common bomb-smelling sensors in U.S. airports. Austrian manufacturer Ionicon Analytik was recently featured in Scientific America because of its new Ionicon Analytik's Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) machine. This machine is about the size of a refrigerator and is so sensitive that it can distinguish between molecules that are nearly identical. The device works by creating "protonated" water vapor, which is essentially water vapor with extra protons. Many organic compounds, including explosives, have an affinity to grab those extra protons and in turn become positive themselves.The positive ions produced can be extracted and analyzed to reveal their chemical composition.
Traditional carbon dating methods required that a small piece of the object must be destroyed through burning. The carbon is then measured for age based on degeneration of the radioactive isotope Carbon 14. Yet with many artifacts the destruction of even small portions of it is sometimes prohibitive. A new non-destructive method allows the object to be placed a container that is filled with an electrically charged plasma gas similar to the plasma found in a high-definition TV. The plasma gently oxidizes the artifact, which will release trace amounts of carbon dioxide that can then be used for Carbon14-decay analysis.
These six ways are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's currently being developed. For example, perspective search service GlobalSpec lists thousands of companies designing gas and chemical sensors. How many of these sensors will one day generate data for the Web? If you have a sense of scenarios that will make this happen, please post your comments below.
Image by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator
May 10, 2010
The development of systems that allow city wide exchange of data and the reaction to that data is important to study. The impact of what is sometimes called the sentient city is not just at a city level but it also impacts communities, neighborhoods and families.
Intelligent Cities can create personal, helpful, efficient and communal cities. In four articles on PSFK, I’m going to describe each of these four aspects and the manifestations occurring today that point to a better urban future.
We are broadcasting information about us more than ever before and we can interpret this data to help us understand our quantified selves.
Devices collecting personal data about our lives give individuals deep levels of insight on their habits and behaviors. These systems are often passive, gathering data in the background from day-to-day activities. Over time, this information gives people the tools and motivation for people to improve their lives.
Manifestations Of The Personal City
Check In & Share
The popular Foursquare service provides a simple example of how people appear to be more willing to provide their personal information. Foursquare is a combination city guide and social game that encourages people to explore their cities while broadcasting information about their location. Users are motivated to share this personal data as part of a competition with their social circle, receiving points each time they check in at locations such as restaurants and bars.
Passive mobile apps monitor sleep habits over time
Mobile applications like Owl and Sleep cycle track a user’s sleep habits passively during each night. By monitoring a user’s movements, snoring levels, and other ambient data from the environment, these services collect a comprehensive database of information that helps to better understand one’s behavior.
Shared Traffic Info
Waze is a free mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data. Drivers can actively report and update other users with what’s happening on the road including accident alerts, police traps, weather hazards, cheap gas offers and more.
Connected body scale wirelessly sends weight data to the web
The Withings Connected Body Scale measures a user’s weight, fat mass, and lean mass, and sends that data wirelessly to a personal profile online. The device syncs with Google Health to build a long-term picture of the user’s health information.
Future Developments
How could the Personal City enhance our lives? Here is some of the suggestions we received at a recent presentation with Asian/Pacific region bloggers:
1. A weight monitoring system tells you what to eat
2. In-depth data allows for better matchmaking service
3. Find likeminded people to sit together when you travel
4. Monitor energy consumption
5. Understand the relationship between food types and your weight gain
There are plenty of other ways the Personal City can evolve. Leave your suggestions in the comments box.
Next Steps
PSFK has prepared a unique presentation on Intelligent Cities. If you would like to invite our staff to present it to your team and discuss possible opportunities for your company to explore, contact PSFK’s Jeff Weiner – jeff.weiner@psfk.com
