For
the tech geeks like most of us are rushing to become, the pathway to heaven is
now marked out. Soon we’ll have our cloud beneath our feet. No harps yet and
with electric cars becoming popular, the traffic noise will be much reduced
except for the squeal of the occasional pedestrian getting run over while
checking their data.
The
latest development from Spain is the iPavement (1, 2), these are paving slabs
with WiFi and Bluetooth built in so that we can be connected wherever we
wander, except in the digitally challenged countryside of course.
The
paving slabs have microprocessors built in with 5 GB per slab and it’s
anticipated that one slab every 20 meters (or 66 feet for the metrically
challenged) should be sufficient for smartphone or tablet users to “wander
lonely on their cloud” (apologies for the mis-quote) without losing signal and
staying buried in their personal business.
All
the common browsers should be fine and it is planned to bring them out with
their own group of apps such as via books, via maps and an analytic package. Of
course this will just be the start. One can imagine each slab guiding you to
the next in case you get lost or ask for a particular destination.
Equipped
with temperature sensors and a speedometer working via vibration sensing, I
imagine the paving will start to tell passers by to hurry up or stop running. I
guess one will have to park their car or curb-crawl if our cars are going to
make use of it.
- http://www.ipavement.com/en/index_eng.html
- http://news.discovery.com/tech/ipavement-wi-fi-sidewalk-120428.html
