To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington’s computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

“Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people’s privacy at the same time,” Balazinska said. “We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality.”

via UWnews.org

“Equipped with the appropriate technology, DAIM sprays graffiti into empty space. In a large hall, three cameras using Motion Capturing record DAIM’s position and the movements he executes with a virtual spray can. The assimilated data is shown to him in real time in a pair of video glasses – as free-floating 3D graffiti in space. In this way he can decide how and where to apply his strokes, and via a Bluetooth controller can also determine the colours, strength of brushstrokes and textures of his work.”

via woostercollective

Sandy Pentland, a researcher at MIT whose work has received funding from Nokia, is working on processing more than 350,000 hours of data collected from peoples’ cell phones. More than just who calls who, Pentland is also studying proximity, location and activity data using information like interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices.

  MIT Researcher Collecting Passive Social Graph Data From Cellphone Activity, Bluetooth