The new wave of very small consumer projectors, called “pico projectors”, is very exciting.

I saw a comment on the Cinemin blog where the person used it to project movies on the ceiling of their hotel room while traveling.  I think the entertainment uses are great but I’m really excited by the possibilities for ad hoc expression.  Those of us in technology tend to think of “sharing” in the digital sense almost as much as we do in the physical. Share a link, share a tweet, share a picture.  There are companies like ShareThis with business models based on sharing digital content (and the meta data around those action).

Still, physical sharing carries messages in a very powerful way and the ability to bridge the digital<->physical divide is like a super power.  Will future generations of smart phones have pico projectors?

Connected devices may increasingly “nudge” us in physical ways in order to share information.  Right now the phone vibrates when there’s an incoming call.  In the future, the nudge might be an electrical impulse rich with information.

I call the ever growing number of connected mobile devices the pico cloud.  The tiniest partition of the internet network.  You’re probably thinking, “Will there really be a trillion connected mobile devices?”  I agree, it’s a lot; about 100 devices for every person on earth with a population nearly twice what it is today.  Still, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Each of these devices will be capable of saying “I’m here” to any number of other devices in the pico cloud.  And they will all capture and transport information that will inform our physical interaction with the world.

No doubt the protocols for identity, security, routing, and management of the pico cloud will need to evolve in concert with the flood of devices.

UPDATE: This TED talk by Patti Maes from MIT Fluid Interfaces lab gives a great demo of the possibilites – called 6th sense.