Communications of the ACM
Programming a paintable computer
Programming a paintable computer
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The Object-Based Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory is developing robust, self-organizing programming models for dense ensembles of ultra-miniaturized computing nodes which are deployed by the thousands in bulk fashion, e.g. embedded into building materials. While such systems potentially offer almost unlimited computation for multimedia purposes, the individual devices contain tiny amounts of memory, lack explicit addresses, have wireless communication ranges only in the range of millimeters to centimeters, and are expected to fail at high rates. An unorthodox approach to handling of multimedia data is required in order to achieve useful, reliable work in such an environment. We describe the hardware and software strategies, and demonstrate several examples showing the processing of images and sound in such a system.