technical notes

There are roughly 3 areas where we can pursue technical innovations:

1. the inner design and functioning of the bug

- we can explore the modularity of separate processing and sensing units that can come together to achieve different kinds of functionalities and sensing.

- we can explore antenna designs for wireless communication

- we can explore interface design ideas on how someone can control certain functionalities of the bug: how to make it change color, make sounds, move, turn off and so on. We shall call this the Human-to-Bug Interaction design approach, or HBI for short.

- the bug's physical structure can become a circuit. Jewellery circuits. There is some work in this area already, but nothing very radical.


2. the communication between bugs

- there is not much being done on location engines outside of robotics (which is very task driven) and a new IC from chipcon just came out for that. Anything we make with them will end up being innovative. Think about low resolution, distributed pixels displays.

- we can experiment with the idea of electronic pheromones. Radio waves that can allos bugs to sense each other or sense "humans" and where they are (or how close they are). This can be used for bugs to mimic each other's behaviour or exchange data about their hosts. For example, people can know that there is another bug owner around if they their bug starts shaking. The closer they are to this person the more the bug will shake. They can them choose to run towards or away from the person. It's a way of creating smart mobs without a central authority or a predefined location.


3. the nature and functioning of power substrate

- we can use the ferric conductive threads to "attract" bugs to substrate and create a solid connection (it's not mechanical and uses particular electrophysical properties of the threads). We can combine this to a weaving structure that could have 3 separate layers (conductor>insulator>conductor) and the bug could be pierced through. (similar to Pushpin concept from Media Lab, but made out of fabric).

- once on the substrate, the bugs can be directly powered or be recharged. Here we can experiment with inductive charging on a fabric substrate, which I've never heard of... But there are a lot of other things out there which I haven't heard of. We've already made fabric coils, we are not far from using them for induction. Induction also leads to communication by close fabric contact.