Emerging wirelessly?

One of the more interesting ideas from yesterday’s Interactive Telecoms Program show I went to at NYU with Paula was the ‘Neighbor Node’ – note Amerikan speeling there. Neighbour nodes are short range wireless networks that anyone can post into within 100m, so the local neighbours. It’s a student project at the moment so not many nodes, but loved the idea – then combined with different levels of nodes for propogation of higher level information. It’s really along the lines of ’emergence’, the idea that systems with simple rules that are applied on a local level can produce higher level order and patterns (on which there’s a great book).

Other things of note:

• ‘Glowbits‘ – fun glowy lights that slide in and out and seem to hypnotise women… although that may just have been the good looking (semi-geeky) guy demonstrating
• socialight – a bluetooth application for your phone for meeting people, somewhat along the lines of dodgeball (the founders came from ITP as well)
• a constantly moving display of triangular wooden blocks with a camera in the middle, that converts the image into rotations of the blocks creating different darknesses of shadow and hence the picture in wood. Hard to describe but very cool indeed.
• and, of course ‘PacManhattan‘, where real people run around Manhattan as PacMan characters (this got written up in the New Yorker the other week).