Speck-tacular advance in sensor technology

Five Scottish universities have teamed up to form a Consortium that has successfully developed minute semiconductor grains that can sense and compute locally and communicate wirelessly.

Researchers from the Speckled Computing Research Consortium recently unveiled two applications for the 1 mm3 devices at London’s Science Museum: a speck that could be moved up or down in the air to play a computer game, and one to track visitors around the museum.

The researchers will spend £5m over the next five years, including a £3.7m grant from the EPSRC, to develop both the software and hardware to make specks commercially attractive.

Consortium director Damal Arvind said that all specks would have three abilities in common; the ability to sense, process the data that is being sensed, and to share that information among all the neighbouring specks.

The two applications that have so far been shown use specks that contain motion sensors. Other specks would have different types of sensors to measure temperature, humidity, light or speed.