Snowballs in Cyberspace

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

In the early 1980s -- before the Internet became a cultural icon -- students at Carnegie Mellon University wired photosensors to the indicator lights on a Coke machine, programmed a computer to count the cans as they were dispensed, and connected the whole contraption to the network. By typing the command finger coke cs.cmu.edu, anybody with an Internet account at Carnegie Mellon -- or anywhere else -- could tell at a glance how many cans were left.

It was, as the engineers like to say, a clever hack -- one that touched the basic urge in computer users to control the world through their keyboards -- and it soon spawned imitators. At the University of Cambridge, for example, British students aimed a camera at the computer lab's coffeepot and transmitted, on demand, digital snapshots of the state of the brew.

But with the invention of the World Wide Web -- which makes navigating the Internet as easy as pointing and clicking a mouse -- the task of constructing (and accessing) these projects became infinitely easier. The new game online -- at least among those users who are handy with both modems and soldering irons -- is to wire up computers with cameras, microphones, robot arms and all manner of sensors to make something cool and really useless that everybody can enjoy.

Need to know the current temperature in Boulder, Colorado or Stockholm? Just point and click. Want to hear what's being said right now in the University of Waterloo's computer-science club? A microphone in the office is linked to the Internet. Like to see how other people spend their days? There are live cameras, accessible through the Web, pointed at busy laboratories all over the world.

Some of these devices can claim to have some purpose. Traffic monitors -- linked to sensors on the freeways -- display the driving conditions in Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle. Cameras mounted near California beaches transmit video clips of surf conditions every 10 minutes.

But most sites are being built just because they can be, and the newest ones are increasingly self-referential. In St. Louis, Missouri, Brian Gottlieb has wired his telephone to display to Internet users the hour and date of his most recent phone call. Paul Haas in Ypsilanti, Michigan, has hooked a computer to his refrigerator and hot tub to report their respective temperatures. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Michael Witbrock uses a voice synthesizer to let online visitors "talk" to the cat that likes to sleep in the warmth of his modem.

What's truly bizarre is that people actually visit these places -- not just in ones or twos but by the thousands. The hot spot this past holiday season was the Rome Lab Snowball Cam, which advertises itself as a robot arm, ice machine and camera setup that invites Internet visitors to heave snowballs at engineers working at an Air Force base in Rome, New York. Like so many other Pentagon projects, however, the Snowball Cam turned out to be less than it promised. The lab was real. So were the engineers. The snowballs, however, were "virtual" -- which is to say, no fun at all. But that didn't prevent Internet users from stopping by the site before Christmas -- at the rate of one every minute and a half.