Unknown0:08
Thank you, Fergus, for having me here. I'm here as a representative of the Air Quality Egg community. But before I dive into everything, I'd like to take a minute for everybody to take a deep breath right now.
Now imagine walking along Fifth Avenue in Midtown. What's the air like? How about getting stuck in high traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge? What are you breathing in? Air is invisible, yet it is intricately tied to us in so many ways.
Right there, that window, there's the indoor air and the outdoor air. Both could be the same, but they're really completely different from one another. And in fact, it was just different two seconds ago. How does it move? What is it made of? And what is the impact on our lungs and bodies when we breathe that air in?
So, diving into the Air Quality Egg: Air Quality Egg is an open source project that has been working toward a better understanding of the air we breathe. The Air Quality Egg as an open source project is an experiment, both scientific and social. Scientific in the sense that we are pushing really cheap sensors and putting it all together, developing already existing technologies, and trying to map what we're breathing in. Social in the sense that we are actually an interdisciplinary collaborative, or interdisciplinary, we collaborate with engineers, designers, architects, hopefully journalists as well, and many more. And one thing is also we have been working in different parts of the world. We've been utilizing platforms like GitHub, wikis, and Google Groups. In fact, our Google Group is so very active right now. And so, because this is an open source project, I want to be clear that I'm going to outline three following approaches that are personal, and I'm sure others from the community will undoubtedly have their own opinions.
So the first approach that Air Quality Egg, I think, is trying to do is, it's kind of obvious, but it's to make air visible. So what we have, this is a little bit not technical, but I mean we have the sensors. Our technical setup is that we have two eggs. This is coming from a maker part of the community or perspective. We have the sensors in the outdoor egg, and that transmits data to the indoor egg, which is a base that then uploads that data to the internet. Used to be Pachube, now it's Cosm, and it's again, somebody had mentioned whatever it is right now. So essentially, this is one scenario where you can just hang your egg outside and see what kind of data you're coming in. So that's the first approach: visualizing the air you breathe. We launched a Kickstarter, we got these eggs out. They were a little bit more delayed than we had liked, but they were manufactured up in Ithaca with Wicked Device. And we're still working on the hardware and software. And so some more images of the eggs deployed, and this is some visualizations. At this time, this is Cosm.
The second approach is to take not-so-precise data. And that's being a little political, honestly. These sensors are really cheap, they're uncalibrated, and we constantly get criticized for this all the time, and I'm sure we will continue to be criticized for this. And we've made it really apparent and clear many, many times that this is not what we're trying to do. So why are we still doing this? One reason is that instead of one $20,000 sensor, which have been deployed in New York, or a couple of them, we have 100, 200 sensors. We can cover more ground. If one fails, we have 99 more. They're available for anyone. We can place them anywhere we want. And hopefully after a while, we can get a critical mass where we can actually see trends in data.
And so the last thing that I want to bring in is we have been building an open community where people are still talking in the Google group. They've been collaborating. We have data scientists, we have hardware people, we have software people. This is one developer from inside that's been making some visualizations. And also, continuing to build communities to better understand the data afterwards, and partnering with, or people have been working from universities and researchers have been using the eggs and trying to compare them to existing infrastructure. And so that's my talk. Thank you.
