On Cephalisation

Is that how you spell it? It’s how I spell it.

There’s a thing here from Wired about using hacked Wiimotes as scientific senors.

on account of their being relatively cheap and being able to do a bunch of stuff, as it were. I’m quite keen on the idea of an iPhone basically being a detachable head… it has a load of sensors, a brain, can communicate as well as merely sense etc – and apparently the thing that is facilitating this robotics revolution that’s about to break, is the arrival of cheap sensors (previous revolutions were brought about by cheap CPUs and cheap lasers).

So it kindof makes sense to me to have a kind of “sensor pack”. Rather than having separate electronic components, and the expertise required to combine them with resistors and wires and drivers and such… just have a single thing with a whole array of sensors that can plug into any computer using USB or bluetooth or whatever. Detachable heads again.

I guess all you’d really need is to get a detachable web-cam with a microphone and add wii-like motion-sensors to it as well. It would be quite good to have some sort of chemical sensor as well though. To act as a smoke-alarm maybe…. or monitor air-quality. To monitor microbial composition etc – there was a thing on TED a while back where someone talked about using cellphones for global environmental monitoring. Not sure if anything’s happened though. I should really go back over all the stuff I’ve written about in the last year, get in touch with everyone concerned and ask “and then what happened?”

Anyway – detachable sensor-packs. They’re coming. Probably.