It’s like talking to a wall…?
Ever heard the saying “It’s like talking to a wall”? Used when talking to someone who’s unresponsive or…a bit thick? Well, no need to talk to stupid people when you can talk to intelligent concrete – yep, they now have concrete walls that can talk.
Sumitomo Osaka Cement and YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory have developed concrete embedded with RFID tags – cyber concrete! The special tags hold more data than the average IC tags, and when a reader is held to the walls, the data in the tags gets transferred to the reader and converted to spoken form.
The original idea behind this is to greatly improve safety inspections. Last year there was a big scandal when it was discovered that one of the most respected atrchitects in Japan fabricated the earthquake-resistance of 98 apartment buildings around Tokyo. When the cyber-concrete becomes available for commercial use this year, inspectors can hold the receiver up to the wall and the wall will dutifully recite when, where and how it was manufactured, plus data about it’s strength and quality. The safety inspector can then judge whether the building has met building safety requirements.
This is just the start of it though. In the future, I’m sure those RFID tags will hold much more and different data. It’ll all draw us closer to that computer-run home dream, don’t doubt it.
Link:
Pink Tentacle
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