Recent developments in sensor network technologies have taking the virtual world into a smarter level. The projects of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT explored an emerging trend called “Cross reality”. The cross reality experiments are done in second life, a 3D virtual world community with 15 million current subscribers.

Well, what is cross reality? It connects “location specific 3D animated constructs” in the virtual world to in-building sensor installations.  In one of the projects, they chose to use power strips as they are present everywhere plus they have a power and can be connected to a network. MIT made the strips to blow and take the virtual world into the next level. The researchers also added some features to the power strips via expansion boards such as motion sensors, temperature sensors, and memory cards for local data logging.

The group has created a whole portal network known as Ubiquitous sensor portal in the real world media lab. It has an array of sensors as well as audio and video capabilities for user interaction. There are 45 portals currently in the Lab; each one is integrating a myriad of environmental sensors such as motion, light and sound level, vibration, temperature, and humidity.

They also showed a set of simpler 2D visualizations that enable mobile devices to efficiently browse and interact with sensor network data. The group of MIT is still working on this experiment to give the best result.