Smart Dust

Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter

The Smart Dust project is funded by DARPA.

One possible application of smart dust is a virtual keyboard:

"Glue a (smart) dust mote on each of your fingernails. Accelerometers will sense the orientation and motion of each of your fingertips, and talk to the computer in your watch. You can imagine much more useful and creative ways to interface to your computer if it knows where your fingers are: sculpt 3D shapes in virtual clay, play the piano, gesture in sign language and have the computer translate."

"Combined with a MEMS augmented-reality heads-up display, your entire computer I/O would be invisible to the people around you. Couple that with wireless access for surfing the web."