The Internet of things

The dot-com mantra "the Internet changes everything" was based on a misnomer. It referred not to the Internet itself but to the World Wide Web, which is only one of many possible ways to use a global data network--and not even the most profound one.

Soon, though, you may hear the mantra again. The Internet really can "change everything," not by serving up pages for human eyes, but by letting the everyday objects of the physical world talk to each other--on their own, without human intervention.

What might that get you? Pill bottles could send medication status and refill requests to doctors and pharmacists. Every clock in your home could the show the same (correct) time. Your house key could announce your arrival and turn on the lights and television and air-conditioning. Your coffee table could be a touch screen displaying anything from household to worldwide information. The next home you inhabit could be vastly cheaper to build by having no primitive wiring in its walls at all, using instead wireless switches to control wireless lights and appliances. And your mobile phone could look into and control that home from anywhere.

Creating such an "Internet of Things" is the purpose of Internet-Zero, an initiative from MIT's interdisciplinary Center for Bits and Atoms, led by physicist Neil Gershenfeld. All the examples given above have been demonstrated in recent implementations around the world.

Internet-Zero offers a single, seamless, consistent mechanism for letting anything talk to anything else--even non-electronic things like printed bar codes or ordinary metal keys. The result is a world where computing works invisibly for you, rather than you playing nursemaid to complex, unfriendly computers. You won't need a network engineer to screw in a smart light bulb, or an IT department to turn it on.