by Mia Kos

One possible vision of our future is a creation of an interconnected system of people, objects and environments that communicate with each other through a global network. By creating this network we would enable objects and environments to become active participants in the virtual world–something that has, till now, been reserved strictly for people. Key concepts behind this idea are ubiquitous interconnectivity, networked objects communication and ability of objects and environments to define themselves in space and time.

Active Environments is a service build on the concept of networked environments. Its reveals one small piece of a vast puzzle, that is slowly but persistently becoming our reality. It’s a system that supports people to connect and enable environments to communicate through the Internet. The long term goal of the project is to give a virtual voice to every existing environment.
Through the Active Environments website people can learn how to ‘’activate’’ their environments. Activation is done by setting sensors connected to the internet (this part of the application is based on the Pachube platform) and by a creation of a website for a chosen environment. In this way users could enable the environment to start communicating in the virtual world through its own website with various functionalities. The data that an environment sends would be used to define and follow its health state. Also, it would be used to compare environments, thus helping people to detect the environments that are being threatened by pollution. Users would get help and support with their environment’s activation as the Active Environments system would also function as a sharing point of ideas and guidelines for various open-source devices that can be used for environmental data collection.