hello.

This IBM research article describes using the human body as a transmission element in a data network (very personal area networking), and seems to pre-date this Microsoft patent by at least four years.

There is more on this topic available at MIT, among others. Olin Shivers’ 1993 presentation on bodyNets is the earliest I’ve found so far.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, electronics, networked objects, networks

Neuroscientists in Montreal, Denmark, and the US have developed a Braille-like tongue display of 144 pixels, that stimulates the visual areas of the brain through the tongue. Interesting, but can you talk and read at the same time? It may be impractical now, but it’s an interesting approach to the problem of providing vision replacement or augmentation through technology.

More details can be found at this link.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold’s Smart mobs blog for the links.

Technorati Tags: electronics, displays, sensors

Allan Englehardt sent me a link to a new product, the Bug, which is essentially a TiVo for Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB). Allan’s notes on it are here. The basic premise of it is that DAB is just transmission of a digital data stream, so there’s no reason you can’t put a hard drive in the radio (or just a bunch of RAM) and give it the radio a buffer, so you can pause the broadcast. Pretty nifty.

Would it be possible to extend this a bit? How are songs encoded on a digital audio broadcast? Are song titles in the header? Would it be possible to combine the technologies in the Bug with a frequency scanner and create a sort of super Air-TiVo, that scans the airwaves for songs you’re interested in, and saves them when they’re played? Could that be taken a bit further, and combined with Bluetooth, 802.11, or another short-range radio protocol to make a wireless P2P system, in the spirit of the Bass Station, combined with BlueWalk? How many lawyers would the RIAA throw on this grenade, I wonder?

Technorati Tags: networked objects, networks