Reading Everyware and thinking about Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT06 and ETECH, I was mumbling about the idea of googling objects to know where they are. What Bruce was saying:

“I have an Internet-of-Things with a search engine of things. So I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them. As long as machines can crunch the complexities, their interfaces make my relationship to objects feel much simpler and more immediate. I am at ease in materiality in a way that people never were before.”

What I am interested in is how such a system tells the PROPER "locative assertion" (that is to say the name of the referred place). In the example above, my shoes can be "under my bed", "on the third shelves under a pile of old rubbishes in my parent's garage" and sometimes the scale is a lot bigger if you want the system to tell you that you threw your car keys in the pacific ocean.

From my perspective the challenge is to give "the users" a relevant indication of the whereabouts: sometimes it's the name of a room, sometimes it's geographical coordinates...

Of course, there is an interesting roundup/special case, especially when it comes to objects as described in "“Where Are the Christmas Decorations?”: A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations" by Lewis Creary, Michael VanHilst from HP Labs. The paper describes a storage location memory assistant that saves and retrieves information about the locations of stored objects in and around the user's house. Something that would do:

User: Where are the Christmas decorations? PDA: They're in the leftmost medium-sized white box under the wood table in the garage.

But of course, you would have to tell the system where the object is, which is not that convenient, especially when you LOOSE TRACK of things.