Catalogo Experimenta 06

American hotels are equipped to allow a mother on a business
trip to eat together with the husband and children at the
house, making the co-presence through systems of video conferencing
on a computer and with the possibility of ordering,
through Internet, the same pizza in the same chain of home
delivered pizzas. The orders will be sorted automatically in
such as way that the pizzas are delivered in a synchronous
manner and the whole family can eat together.
Also interesting are the evolutions of the systems and technologies
that allow one to enjoy visualisation on the move,
from the best screens for the mobile phones to the systems
of visualisation through glasses or screens based on reflections
of light. The systems of visualisation that use the lenses
of glasses are interesting, as they stimulate applications of
mixed reality, that is to say those in which the vision of the
real world is superimposed, when needed, artificial images (as
already happens in training pilots of planes).
Screens based on the reflection of light, such as those that
use e-Ink technology, have the characteristics of sheets of
paper. That is to say, they take advantage of the light present
in the environment to make information visible. If we
try to use a portable computer on the beach, we will discover
that the screen is practically illegible: the competition
with sun light is too uneven. On the other hand, if we take
a notebook and try to read it in a dark room: there is not
sufficient light “to see”.
With e-Ink we have on the screen the same characteristics as
a sheet of paper, with an additional advantage of having images
in movement. These new “books” open interesting prospectives:
we obviously think of a text book to teach English.
After a page of grammar it becomes natural to open up a
conversation with a point of the earth in which one can interact
with those who speak English, jumping perhaps from
New Delhi to Adelaide to realise how that simple “Hello” is
transformed according to the place. To learn is transformed
according to the places. To learn therefore becomes an involving
adventure, because it signifies testing ourselves with the
world, and not only with a teacher.
IDENTIFICATION AND LOCALISATION TECHNOLOGIES
Over the years a variety of technologies have been adopted
to allow the localisation and identification of objects and
persons, with motivations which go from the increase of
efficiency to safety. The technology family, which goes under
the name of RFID tag (Radio Frequency Identification),
should crowd out, substituting them, the bar codes used in
the majority of cases. Not only. It should also permit the application
to other categories of objects, such as, for example,
information.
There also exist other technologies applicable in specific segments,
for example, the labelling for fixed objects: in future
it will be difficult to find an object that is not unequivocally
identifiable.
With the presence of a tag (label) in every object and the
parallel presence of detectors of tags in a variety of devices,
starting with mobile phones, an extremely interesting market
is opened up, to which some attribute the name of Information
Wrapping (Wrapped up with Information). In practice to each
object that has a tag there corresponds an amount of information
present on one or more sites, management by one
or more organisations, which it is possible to access starting
with the object itself.
In Japan this technology is used to charge telephones with
virtual money, leaning it upon an ATM machine and then
using it, always in the same way, money, leaning the telephone
on the cash machine at the desk of a supermarket.
Another lot of technologies, important and very near that of
identification, are that of localisation. Today we have systems
of satellite localisation GPS (Global Positioning System), tracing
through electronic boe that intercept special transpon-
INDEX SCIENTIFIC STUDIES
137