What happens when every physical object and place has an internet IP address? This could happen in the very near future, and the impact on daily life could be profound.
Several trends are already moving in that direction:
- Hardware: We already see RFID tags used to track the whereabouts of consumer goods. Consumer electronics, vehicles, and surveillance equipment are all embedded with GPS chips to broadcast their location. Micro- and nano-sized taggants can be sprayed on virtually anything to serve as invisible identifiers.
- Networking: The trend to network as many things as possible through the internet will certainly continue. Phones, game consoles, TVs, video recorders, surveillance cameras, refrigerators, cars, wristwatches, even shoes are all devices that used to exist in isolation, and are now being increasingly networked together. Soon, other wearable computing devices such as our Google Glasses or other augmented reality video eyewear will be logging on too.
- Capacity: Each device on the internet needs its own Internet Protocol address, and we've been running out of them lately on the old 32-bit IPv4 infrastructure. Over the course of this summer, however, the world is witnessing the rollout of IPv6, the next-generation, 128-bit Internet Protocol address standard. Whereas IPv4 limits the total number of IP addresses to a mere 4.3 billion--a number we've already reached--IPv6 offers room for 340 undecillion IP addresses. That's 340 trillion trillion trillion, or 340 * 10^36. By way of comparison, there are about 1.33*10^50 atoms in the entire Earth. So we will end up with far more virtual real estate than we could ever have in actual physical space.
What will come from this convergence between physical and virtual space? Think for a moment about the various trends that are well underway today--including the Internet of Things, social networking, surveillance, and augmented reality--and what all that space means for them.
1. The Internet of Things
This is the phenomenon of equipping digital devices to communicate with each other through the internet. Try to picture in your mind the sheer number of commercial products that are manufactured and sold every year. It's impossible. With IPv6 in place, literally every single one of those units--every Barbie doll, toilet paper roll, and random chatski--can have its own unique IP address on the internet. Each becomes a data point capable of reporting its exact physical location on a real-time, global map.
But even more interestingly, each such point also becomes capable of communicating and interacting with every other internet-equipped object or place around it in ways limited only by the creativity of its software. Sure, we're likely to see a lot of cool things emerge from this capability--like cars that avoid collisions and toys that play with each other--but the privacy implications are also staggering.
2. Social Networking
The need to communicate is essential to what it means to be human. At its core, the internet is, and always has been, intended as a way for people to communicate with each other. Now that internet-enabled social media has taken root in our society, it is rapidly altering our habits and expectations for interpersonal communication.
Yet the interactivity offered by websites such as Facebook and Twitter will likely seem quaint in comparison to a fully networked IPv6 world. Facebook recently floated a "Find Friends Nearby" feature, and and one developer recently made a splash with a"Girls Around Me" app. Augmented reality developers are already taking this concept one step further; their apps will show your friend's social information literally floating over their heads, or hanging in space above their houses.
Regardless of how the information is visualized, however, having everything connected to the internet will make it easier for us to broadcast our physical location to our friends. Today, for example, I need to make a conscious choice to check in on Foursquare or broadcast my GPS coordinates on Google Latitude. Tomorrow, my internet-connected clothing (let alone my phone, eyewear, or other computing device) might automatically do all of that, and more. Want to know what your friend is wearing today? Log on to see which outfit she's "checked in" to. Wonder who your best friend is out with? You can remotely identify the digital signatures of all your mutual friends within a given radius of her.
3. Surveillance
Along with the ability to communicate comes the ability to track. It's already a given that we are recorded by hidden video cameras in virtually every public place. Networked camera systems using facial recognition technology to track people across multiple locations are already feasible and are certainly being used in some areas. But in an IPv6-networked world, such systems can be enhanced by tying in other sensory data from internet-connected walls, doors, floor tiles, and the like. What's more, these objects could be remotely commanded to react to the person as well--like the networked entryways that kill off a couple characters at the beginning of Dan Suarez's Daemon.
4. Augmented Reality
AR--the ability to visualize digital data on top of physical space, or "Terminator vision"--has, as one commentator put it, "been the Next Big Thing for a while now, although it never manages to become the Actual Current Big Thing." The biggest limiting factor holding back the AR revolution is hardware. Mechanical vision technology just isn't sophisticated enough to do what we expect of AR eyewear--which is to recognize a diverse range of moving, differently lit physical objects and render accompanying digital graphics over them in real time.
So AR companies are forced to "cheat" by tying their virtual content to 2D markers such as QR codes or other pre-programmed patterns. We have to look at those markers in order to see the content. AR companies are making great strides in "markerless" technology, but they'll all admit that the field has a long way to go before we reach true, seamless, real-time interactivity between the digital and physical worlds.
While we're waiting for markerless technology to improve, I and others have postulated another solution: flooding the physical world with micro- or nano-sized taggants to serve as tiny markers. Especially if such markers were connected to the internet, this would give AR devices the 3D telemetry they need to truly map out the physical world, and in turn to overlay digital data on top of it. Shortly after I originally wrote about this, the UK company Berg came out with an "augmented comic book" called SVK. The premise of this story was remarkably similar (SPOILER ALERT): bad guys spray invisible, nano-sized particles into the atmosphere across London. When they get enmeshed in peoples' skin, the particles are able to broadcast that person's thoughts. Characters wearing special AR contact lenses are then able to see the thoughts of people around them in visual form.
The particulars of this story--mind-reading and such--are fanciful, but the conceived infrastructure underlying the idea is at least plausible. Tying together trillions of invisible markers with AR eyewear capable of recognizing those markers would be a quick way to create a highly detailed, three-dimensional, interactive map of the physical world--especially if many of those data points have individual addresses in the IPv6 system.
Can it be much longer before our world starts looking a lot more like Tron's?
