Identifying Plant Species

White has been working with botanists at the Smithsonian Institute to create mobile applications that can help scientists identify plant species in the field. Normally, identification requires looking at a leaf, and then flipping through pages of pictures to find a likely match. A skilled botanist can narrow down their search, but the process is still time consuming and difficult.

Using image recognition technology, White and the Smithsonian have created mobile apps that can help identify leaves from pictures. Simply snap a picture of the leaf, and the app narrows down the search to likely matches. What's more, the scientists can make the process even easier by strapping on a head-mounted display (HMD) and comparing real leaves to virtual ones displayed in an augmented reality view.

Visualizing Carbon Dioxide Levels for Urban Planning

White also had his hand in helping to develop technology that collects and visualizes CO2 levels in urban areas. By rigging together a device that both detects CO2 levels and receives highly-accurate GPS and elevation data, White was able to create detailed heat maps of urban areas and their CO2 levels.

Taking that experiment a step further, the data was visualized in 3D space and superimposed onto an augmented reality view, providing a third dimension that takes data analysis beyond 2D maps. White says this kind of visualization helps determine causality when anomalies occur in the data.

He recalled seeing high levels in one specific area but wasn't able to determine the cause by looking at the 3D maps. By using the augmented reality view of the data, it was discovered that the area with high CO2 levels was near a street corner where large trucks waited in line to make deliveries. This type of analysis of the data would not have been possible by simply looking at a map.

Finding Optimal Spots for Wind Turbines

The third example White shared focused on wind turbines, and on using AR data visualizations to help pick the most optimal wind locations. Using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, scientists can point the devices up at the air from a spot on the ground and watch particulates float by to determine wind speeds and directions.

In the past, large towers were erected to detect this type of data, but they are expensive, limited in their range and take a long time to set up. Using LiDAR, which is cheaper and easier to use, scientists can cover larger areas and collect more data and reconstruct it into visualizations. They can then use augmented reality to see this data overlaid onto their real-world view to find ideal spots for wind towers.

AR is a Start

What else can AR do to help Mother Earth? An interesting implementation I would enjoy seeing would be to create 3D visualizations that help show the slow death march of the climate crisis. For instance, travellers visiting glaciers could hold up their devices and see what the landscape looked like from their perspective in years past - revealing the gradual retreat of glaciers from global warming.

So can augmented reality help save the planet? Not all by itself, no. But when used to help both scientists and everyday people better see the data in the world around them, it can certainly be a useful tool.

Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they'll always have the right lighting for activities in the house.

We talked last month about Green Goose, which is a green egg with an ethernet connection that can sense how many miles a person has ridden on their bicycle instead of a car. This data ultimately could be synced up with each family members' bank account. So if they chose to ride a bike instead of a car, an automatic transfer of the allotted monthly gas money saved goes from a checking account into a savings account. Green Goose has plans for other similar sensors.

Health and Fitness

When it comes to physical fitness, this family has all the devices we explained in our sensors to keep you fit post. From Nike Plus running shoes, which sends running data to Mom's iPod via a sensor, to grandpa's exercise games via Wii Fit to their youngest son's training program via NordicTracks iFit, to Dad's miCoach pacer, this family is being encouraged by sensors to better understand and improve their physical health.

Water Conservation

The Waterpebble is a simple sensor that's placed in the shower. It measures the duration of the first shower, and when the next person takes a shower a green light inside the pebble will turn to orange to let the person know that their shower-time is half way up. Once the shower goes longer than the recorded time, the pebble gives off a red light. The best part is that after each shower the Waterpebble will fractionally reduce the amount of time the person will be allowed to shower. There's also a reset button for when someone in the family is having a bad day and needs a longer shower.

Energy Use Scoreboard

All electrical appliances in this house plug into Picowatt Wi-Fi smart plugs, which allow the family to communicate and control energy usage via a command center like Intel's prototype home energy monitor. This monitor is what the New York Times refers to as an Energy Use Scoreboard, which calculates energy usage and displays costs in real-time. Once this technology hits the market, the family will be able to add a few goal-setting apps to the control panel and they'll have the tools they
need to minimize their energy use.

Alert Services

Last January we reported on Trackle and the emerging era of alert services. In the Internet of Things house not only does Trackle alert the family about vital events and information going on in their neighborhood, but when Mom wants to make sure her daughter gets safely home from school on her own, she simply puts a Touchatag RFID tag in her backpack, which alerts Mom when her daughter is safely home.

Lighting Optimization

Finally, this home's lighting can be regulated by Pachube (pronounced patch-bay) and Arduino. As we reported last summer, light sensors can be connected to Arduino, which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform. The light sensor data is then sent to Pachube, which connects the sensor data to the Web where the lighting can be controlled via twitter or via a home energy monitor.

Overall, it's important to remember that we're still in the early days of Internet of Things. As these products continue to develop we'll find more and more ways for our devices to coax us to refine our health and our environment.

Did we describe your dream home? Would you live in the Internet of Things home? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo by Svilen Milev.

How Will this Work in the Real World?

According to Google's developer guide, consumers who purchase a PowerMeter-compatible device would activate the device by surfing to the device's built-in HTML server (every PowerMeter device must have one) and configure and activate it. After linking the device to a PowerMeter account - and Google is clearly taking privacy seriously here judging from the instructions - the device will then ping Google every 10 minutes via a secure HTTPS connection to upload its data.

Google and Energy

Google has obviously been very interested in the energy business lately. Just last month, the company got regulatory approval to buy energy in bulk. Google is also using solar panels to power it's Mountain View, CA headquarters and has invested in a number of green energy projects and companies, including eSolar, a company that plans to develop numerous large solar energy projects around the world.

Google puts a strong emphasis on making its data centers as energy efficient as possible. Google doesn't release any data about its energy consumption, but according to some estimates, Google's data center in The Dalles, OR could require as much as 103 megawatts of power to run once it is at full capacity - enough to power the city of Oakland, CA for four months. Getting FERC's approval means that Google now has the ability to negotiate directly with energy producers, which will likely help the company to reduce it's massive energy bills.

Earlier this month, Google granted $5.7 million to 12 university projects in the U.S. to fund research that will look into ways to reduce the energy consumption of large data centers.

Even though Google isn't likely to start selling energy to consumers anytime soon, the company does offer one energy-related product to consumers: PowerMeter. This is a gadget the company offers for consumers whose power companies have already installed smart-meter technology. Google is also using solar panels to power it's Mountain View, CA headquarters and has invested in a number of green energy projects and companies, including eSolar, a company that plans to develop numerous large solar energy projects around the world.

It's also noteworthy that Hohm was developed on top of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.

Like most similar projects, Microsoft's Hohm will hook into the data streams from utilities once they bring their smart grids online Correction: Hohm can bring in data even from utilities that don't support smart meters yet, as long as the utility provider provides a data stream of some form to Microsoft, even if it is not real-time. For now, Microsoft is only rolling out support for 4 utilities (Puget Sound Energy, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, and Xcel Energy), but it's only a matter of time before more utilities will roll out similar projects and smart meters, and as Microsoft's Troy Batterberry, the product unit manager for Hohm, told us in an interview last week, Microsoft plans to make a long-term investment here and support data streams from utilities that offers them. Batterberry also mentioned that Microsoft plans to announce a number of additional partners in the next few months.

Models, Predictions, Education

Besides bringing in real-time information from smart meters, though, Hohm also provides users with interesting data about their own energy consumption even when their utilities are not online yet. All a user has to do is answer some basic questions and Hohm will provide an estimate of a household's energy consumption. For a full assessment, Hohm can ask over 200 questions and the more answers a user provides, the better the estimate will be. In the back-end, Microsoft is constantly tweaking these models based on the real-life data it receives from users whose utilities already allow data to be downloaded to Hohm. Microsoft's Troy Batterberry also told us that these models are already quite reliable, but will only get better as more users enter their data and as Microsoft gets to compare its models with more real-time data from its partners.

Batterberry also stressed that Microsoft wants to make Hohm useful for users right now, not just those whose utilities use smart meters. To educate these users, Hohm also features a large section with resources and tips for saving energy.

Good Now - But Will Get Better Once Real-Time Data is Available for More Users

A simple model, of course, wouldn't be very interesting if users can't experiment with different settings like switching out their standard light bulbs for energy-saving ones, for example. Hohm does a nice job here, but in the end, the real advantage of using Hohm or similar systems will only be unlocked once users can get real-time (or almost real-time) access to their energy data. Once that happens, the "Prius-effect" can then set in, where users change their behavior based on the real-time feedback about their car's (or, in this case, their house's) real-time energy consumption.

Since the Troasts started using the device six months ago, they've decreased their energy use by 15%. Now they're wondering if it will drop even more with the world watching their energy consumption online.

Developers, Want to Make Your Home Tweet?

Although not everyone will want to make their data as public as the Troasts have, we know there are probably a few "do-it-yourselfer" developers who have been waiting for a fun project like this to at least hold them over until Google gets their PowerMeter rolling.

Non-developers, try the Tweet-a-Watt system, instead.

Here's how to create your own real-time TED-tweeting home like the Troasts did:

Materials

• TED (The Energy Detective)
• ASUS WL 500G Deluxe wireless router
• OPEN Wrt operating System
• Google Visualization API

Methodology

1. You'll need a wireless router that has a USB Port and is capable of running an OPEN Wrt operating system. The Troasts went with the ASUS WL 500G Deluxe.
2. Replace the router's existing operating system with the OPEN Wrt operating system (Here's how.)
3. A customized script (customized software) has to then be put into the OPEN Wrt operating system. OK, so this is the hard part, Troast says the developers will post the script online at the EnergyCircle blog in a couple of days if there's interest. So if you're interested, please says so in the comments! Without this key piece of the pie, you're left writing your own script. (And if you do, share!)
4. Plug the TED into the wireless router using TED's USB port.
5. Write the ability to add an annotation to the data into the web site database so that you can annotate the data in the database.
6. Write the data display page using the Google visualization API, which enables you to take the data and annotations and make a chart like the one that you see on the EnergyCircle site. (Specifically, they used the Annotated Time Line feature in Google's visualization API).

Note - How the Data Streaming works:

• The script reads output from the TED every second and records it in a file located on the OPEN Wrt router.
• Each minute, the router posts the output into the Energy Circle Database.

About TED devices: