(light music)

We now live with an array of sensors

that we carry on our bodies at all times.

From the accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPSs

in our phoness, to our watches,

to the wearable devices that we carry.

But one of the things we haven't quite seen yet

is an interaction between the sensors that we have

on our bodies, and the sensors

that are in our environments.

And when those two things actually

start talking to each other,

amazing things can happen.

An early project along those lines

that we tracked recently,

was the Array of Things project in Chicago.

[Charlie] The Array of Things project is a network

of sensors and communication and computing devices.

And these devices are placed throughout the city

on street corners, to let us measure

things about the city that don't normally get measured

with that level of resolution.

Temperature, humidity, precipitation, air quality, sound,

or vibration, or light.

Roughly every 15 seconds, each one of these nodes

will report all the sensor data

to multiple repositories on the web.

Open, free of charge, every 15 seconds.

Every node, every sensor, the data goes out.

Imagine that you're walking through the city of Chicago

and you're running an application on your phones.

That application will see one of our nodes,

and it will grab all the data from all the sensors

and store them on your phones.

Now at the end of the week,

you can look at the number of steps you took

but you can also look at

what was my exposure through the week to carbon monoxide?

Or excessive noise?

Or imagine that you're not familiar with the downtown area.

You've parked your car over here,

and you're eight blocks away.

It's 10:00 p.m.

You can then have an application

that guides you through the city,

along the path that has the most pedestrian activity

or maybe the path that's the brightest path.

From a financial point of view,

cities like Chicago spend millions of dollars

on salt for roads and sidewalks.

If you have a hundred or a thousand temperature readings

through the city, you can put the salt where you need it

and not put the salt where you don't need it.

That doesn't just save money,

it means there's less salt that can run into

the Chicago River, or into Lake Michigan.

So it's an environmental benefit as well.

The city of Chicago is home to

some of the world's most beautiful architecture.

And so our first thought of a commercial box

hidden by some artwork, has evolved into

making the enclosure itself

essentially a public work of art.

So we worked with design students at the school of the

Art Institute of Chicago, and what we did is

design the box digitally,

and then from that digital design what we're able to do

is vacuum-form plastic around that form.

Almost all the things that we design are modeled

in a 3D application, so we can understand

all the implications of shape.

From that 3D digital model, we can use toolpath creation

and a CNC machine to cut the original blank

for the thermal forming process.

The final enclosure will be made out of ABS plastic.

This is a kind of material that

we feel really comfortable with,

we have the tools for forming it here.

It's curved to meet the most common radius

of a Chicago city light pole.

[Charlie] The thing that's most exciting to me

about the project is

we're not just deploying a fixed set of technologies,

but we're deploying a capability.

We're opening this to educators, to the public,

to companies, to use the data

and ultimately we can start to envision

applications for sensors that we don't have yet.

[Cliff] When you have sensors in the

environment around you,

lots of amazing possibilities open up.

You can imagine an environment that knows who you are,

what you want, what you need,

and that sounds a little crazy,

but with projects like the Array of Things,

you begin to see exactly how we might get there.