SENSEI breathes
Interesting SENSEI quarterly meeting at Telenor in Oslo. The WP5 guys spent most of the week hacking in the reception of the Radisson where wifi was good and ports were open to get the demo working for the plenary on Thursday. The pan European testbed is starting to take shape with islands of sensor networks in Norway (2 in the plenary room using two different sensor platforms), Finland (Sensinode) and Romania (where the primary Sensei platform is hosted).
Had some interesting discussions on the proposed field trials – three have been proposed to date including:
1] environmental monitoring using mobile sensor nodes fixed to buses in Belgrade (EYU)
2] workplace monitoring using room access, comfort data, booking information (TID)
3] sports / environmental monitoring in the customisabale environment at eXperience Lab (UTwente)
In the pipeline is to create a SENSEI wrapper to connect the current Arup sensor network data. I need to also throw in a couple of actuatable devices in there. Need to explore possibilities of connecting to and from SENSEI platform via Pachube. Second Life was also mentioned as an interesting platform to test the horizontalisation theme. If we can create a connection between SENSEI applications and objects in SL then we have a virtual mechanism to test multiple uses of SENSEI data.
Also discussed in the field trial session was the issue of horizontalisation. A key goal of the SENSEI architecture is to facilitate the ability for nodes within islands of sensors networks to be re-used by multiple applications. It would be interesting to do an Architecture School project during one of the field trials where all the sensors / actuators being generated for the field trial are accessible for a group of designers to re-purpose / re-imagine the kinds of services that such data could create. Get in touch if you are interested and have a bunch of students…
The photo at the top of the post is of the Telenor buildings in Fornebu, Oslo. I was impressed with the art around the building – striking to me was the digital facade when i arrived which advised that i “think differently” and “be kind to others”. The buiding long facade installation was created in 2002 by Jenny Holzer. I also loved the Daniel Buren columns and the large glass mosaic:
