Image sourced from Disney research article
The internet of things is a term that has come to describe the way that different gadgets throughout your house can communicate with one another. This means that your fridge could talk to your phone and tell you that you have run out of milk or your front door could talk to your light bulbs and tell them to turn on whenever somebody enters the house. There are lots of exciting possibilities and companies are experimenting to see what life changing technology can be developed using this system.
Researchers at Disney have been working on using technology and the internet of things to create a smart home environment. They are working on a having LED light bulbs communicate with other devices such as toys, clothing and other wearable technologies. Rich Pell over on the Electronics EE times spoke to Stephan Mangold, head of the wireless research group, who said “Communication with light enables a true Internet of Things as consumer devices that are equipped with LEDs but not radio links could be transformed into interactive communication nodes. We’re not just talking about sensors, smartphones and appliances. This easily could include toys that have LEDs, creating an Internet of Toys in which toys can be accessed, monitored and acted on remotely.”
This could be used in a variety of interesting ways to improve the toys that young children play with. You could use your action figure with some simple LED’s which are tracked by a camera to become a video game controller. You could have a toy which knows which other toys are nearby and two toys from the same set could be put next to each other and have a conversation. You could set it up with a projection system and have the video playing interact with the toy in real time. The possibilities are endless. With exciting technology like the Internet of Things being developed our houses in 10 years could look very different to how they look today. We look forward to seeing how this technology progresses in future.
Disney also published a paper called “Linux Light Bulbs- Enabling Internet Protocol Connectivity for Light Bulb Networks” which you can read about here.