Media Evolution

Per Johansson runs his own company, Diakrino, and is co-founder of the think tank Infontology.The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

The Internet of Things could be constructed so that things become ”bridges” that enable people to come into contact with each other and understand their environment in new ways.

Imagine you are in a square and you can talk not only with the people there, but also with the fountain, sculptures, benches, and pigeons. What can they say to you? What can you say to them? Who else has talked to them before? What have they said?

The bench would be able to convey thoughts, impressions, and stories from everyone who ever sat on it. The pigeons could tell about where they prefer to sleep and about what is in the air you breathe.

A place full of stories. Photo by* wili, CC BY-NC

Bridge between local and digital

With an Internet of Things that has become as natural as texting is today, we can expect a completely different accessibility and response from and through the physical environment. The boundary between local and nonlocal (digital) is erased, at the same time that places become deeply meaningful.

A fantasy landscape in the midst of daily life. Inspiration can be taken from geocaching, which is based on entering GPS coordinates where a “treasure” is hidden. Then you have to get there.

Participants interact with a digital space, but what really happens is that they discover and explore real locations and the path that leads to them. If they could talk to all manner of things along the way— and find out what ideas, information, pictures others left behind here and there— then the entire physical space could convey an ongoing, more vibrant account of life in the here and now, although, paradoxically, without physical limitations. Endless games and potential meetings could be constructed as needed.

Making sense of large amounts of data

Meaningful experience is intimately linked to stories. The sum of all the data constantly generated, most of it beyond anyone’s consciousness, can in turn be harvested and illustrated in countless ways, both useful and useless, humorous and serious.

Different time dimensions gain a new, immediate significance. Each place, each thing has a future and a history and a series of simultaneous relationships. Enhancing accessibility for all this can raise awareness about what is going on and what we are doing. History can literally be created and recreated on site and in a way that both deepens and broadens the sense of presence. And both intentional and unintentional patterns can be visualized through different interfaces.

As more things are actively included in communicating networks, complexity will increase exponentially. An essential task for the media savvy will be to make this complexity transparent and relevant in a way that strengthens human benefit and inspires a sense of participation.

Robert Bellwaldius is COO at Maingate, which provides solutions using M2M communication. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

Why should a device be connected to the internet, really; what is the purpose and what is driving this trend? Basically, the idea is that if we can get devices to talk directly with each other, we should be able to develop new services that improve our daily lives, create new business, or maybe even raise the entertainment industry to new heights.

Already today, applications are being developed for use in the car, with both utility functions and entertainment features. Homes are getting smarter, particularly from an energy perspective. Televisions are disappearing, to be replaced by the media hub: the computer-games console-TV-radio are merging with the private media collection; photo albums, home movies and music collection are being integrated into one.

But information flows today are by no means connected in a simple manner. Information has to meet somewhere in order to be refined and then generate new intelligent solutions.

Service providers will drive development

Based on developments in recent years, we can conclude that service providers, not communications providers, had the solutions. They did so simply by developing services that are not dependent on communication channels and instead developing services from a user perspective: Skype, Spotify, 100Koll, or any service in a mobile that works as long as there is internet connection.

Already now, it seems like we more or less deliberately allow these “services” to share information. Information from the music service tells Facebook friends what music I play, while the professional networking site receives information from the travel service that I am taking a trip to London. Meanwhile, my energy consumption drops and notifies the contest service along with all the other contest participants that I’m about to win the energy saving contest.

Visions for filmmakers

Consider the filmmaker who can not only display video and audio at home. Add the dimension of smell; clearly there will be a gadget that can generate different types of scents. Obviously, film should be able to automatically generate the right experiences in terms of scents.

Personally, I think film should be experienced in a dark atmosphere; it’s not unreasonable to let the filmmaker take advantage of the opportunity to turn off all the lights in my living room. Or perhaps the cinematic experience should be complemented with light in room, controlled by the film’s storyline. Lightning flashes across the movie screen; why not a weak echo in my environment, too?

A greater film experience. Photo by *mgoulet, CC BY-ND

Of course it could work; “smart” lamps are already available, it just has to be controlled from a movie. Who will be first to provide me with this next generation film experience?

Javier Zorzano works att the Physical Internet Lab at Telefónica Digital. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

It can be considered that in developed countries a practical totality of consumers own a mobile phone and nearly all computers have an Internet connection.

For the worlds Telecommunication providers (the Tel- cos), this is a notable achievement, but also a considerable challenge. User base will not grow, meaning bigger revenues will not be generated in the way it used to. Furthermore, market forces drive revenues and margins down.

Global roaming

The Internet of Things opens up a different landscape. On the one hand and as Robert Louis Stevenson’s verse says: ”The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” In an IoT-world the numbers managed are simply overwhelming. It may take generations to fully connect the physical world. On the other hand, providing this connectivity is something Telcos do naturally, without reinventing themselves.

Telcos have the scale, the technology and the processes to connect anything, anywhere in the world to the Internet. 2G or 3G networks cover pervasively most of the world’s surface. Satellites reach even the remotest locations. Through Telcos networks Internet connected Things can run out of the box, seamlessly, with no configuration by the owner.

A wired world. Photo by* deadair, CC BY-NC-SA


New kinds of interaction

Keyboards and screens have been our interface to the Internet and its content for a long time. Internet content and services lie in a separate world, the cyberspace, that people sporadically view through a ever-shrinking glass.

The Internet of Things allows creators to provide Internet interaction through any kind of physical object. It is especially interesting considering the common objects we use every day as a part of this interface.

On the one hand common objects have simpler interfaces, with reduced expressivity. This is a problem. But, on the other hand, these objects fit human tasks and accompany them silently through their lives. Besides, human beings interact strongly with objects, putting lots of feelings into them.

So, physical objects give new chances to media companies. People will receive or interact with content through their environment, in a completely immersive experience. Creators will be able to coordinate different interfaces, such as sensors, tools, furniture, screens and, of course, web pages or mobile apps.

Of course creators will have to imagine new content structures that fit this new scenario. The challenge is huge but the tools are there and the prize is a fully new world.

Richard Topgaard is a media strategist and developer at Malmö University’s research center for collaborative media, Medea. The text is taken from our publication “Internet of Things”, about how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

We media producers, programmers, scientists and ordinary users have new material to work with called the Internet of Things. This material is at the boundary between digital and analog, virtual and physical, and between private and public.

People have been talking about the Internet of Things as a technical infrastructure for a long time, but it’s getting to be time to think about the values we can create using this infrastructure.

This new material is often created without us having to make an effort. It’s already easy to create and have access to data about how you move about the city without manually entering data in a spreadsheet. Open application programming interfaces allow you to create services and products based on publicly available data.

Applications for the material

There are already many examples of applications based on the new material: apps that automatically send reimbursement claims when your train is delayed, art installations that illustrate how to translate the number of bicycles passing by into dollars, gasoline or carbon dioxide; washing machines that start when the electricity price is lowest, a home that talks to you through social media channels or a car that automatically makes an appointment at the garage when it’s time for an oil change.

From the examples above, we can conclude that we have a long way to go when it comes to developing applications that are actually useful for people. The material we have to work with is complex in nature and I believe that in the future the ability to work across traditional industry boundaries will be invaluable.

What happens, for example, if we let authors and poets work with interaction designers and publishers to create digital poetry?

The result may be I Am Poem, a poetry machine that draws its material from the millions of tweets that people, bots and sensors are churning out every day. I Am Poem took shape partly on a website, but also as a hacked label printer and a lever that could “control the speed of the internet”.

Printed stream from Pär Thörns poem “I am”. 

If we allow many skills to work together, I think we will look back in ten years and wonder why we thought the Internet of Things was so difficult to understand.

If we start focusing on human needs and what these needs look like in different types of environments—public spaces, at home, at a concert or on public transportation—then we will be able to create services and products that not only help us with daily chores, but also make us laugh and cry.