What Dust Can Tell You

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Kris Pister wants to give us a world in which we never lose our car keys again. This Berkeley, Calif., engineering professor foresees office cubicles that change temperature depending on who's sitting in them, traffic lights that know which roads are the most crowded and bestow green lights accordingly, and possessions that tell you exactly where you left them. And how is this brave new world to come about? Through specks of something nearly as tiny, cheap and ubiquitous as dust.

Smart dust, actually. That's the name for the wireless networks of sensors, called motes, that Pister, 39, is building. Each mote has a chip about the size of a grain of rice that detects and records things like temperature and motion at its location. Attach it to a battery the size of an aspirin, and a mote will keep doing this for longer than a year; add a power source the size of a bottle cap, and your mote is good for a decade. Most important, the motes have minuscule radio transmitters that talk to other motes (or to a base station connected to a PC) within 100 feet or so. With a single network of 10,000 motes, the upper limit, you could cover 9 sq. mi.--and get information about each point along the way.

Pister's company, Dust Inc., which he founded in January 2003, has a modest $6 million in start-up funding and 25 employees. The company racked up about $1 million in sales during its first year, but analysts say the mote market could be worth $50 billion in 10 years' time and the price, currently $50 a mote, could easily come down to less than 10¢ each in the same period.

Pister believes his tiny motes will have a transforming effect on how we monitor the world. "It's going to be a hugely revolutionary technology," he says. Already, he has performed an experiment for the U.S. Army in which a mere eight motes were dropped from a plane and used to detect a fleet of vehicles on the ground. Homeland Security will start using smart dust this summer in a pilot project to protect ports in Florida. And Honeywell has started using motes in supermarkets to make giant refrigerators more energy efficient. Says Pister: "There's a potential to do for the physical world what the Net did for the world of ideas."