Smartphones? Try Swarmphones.
According to this article, a Swiss company has developed a package they call Facet — a software application that can connect swarms of cameraphones into an adaptable CCTV network.
The researchers plan to release Facet as an open-source project, allowing anyone to use or modify its code, and to experiment with networked camera phones running the software. “Because of the way we implemented it, the whole thing will run in Java on virtually any phone you want,” Bolliger says. “It will be very nice to see what people come up with.”
Before they release the software, however, the Zurich team hopes to improve it. “The next step is better image analysis – for example, to look at the shape or identity of objects,” Bolliger explains. Facet can currently only spot things around 1 metre in size. “Our goal would be around 10 or 15 cm,” he adds.
“I like the idea of easily connecting many phones,” says Eiman Kanjo, a researcher at Cambridge University in the UK, who is working on using cellphones to record urban pollution.
“But I don’t think they have found the best application yet,” she says. “I think this would be best used in other places, when it becomes open source other people might brain storm and find the killer app.”
[...] or fantastic applications of a lot of the technologies we discuss and trumpet on here, so many of them have an equal footing in a parallel version of the future being grown as we speak by some of the [...]