Desk research over the past months exposed the various fields in which Meta Products are being applied at this moment, which helped to categorize this rich world. Although there are probably a million ways to categorize, we think making an attempt to categorize in the first place enables us to really grasp this world, see trends and opportunities.

1—Sensing wearables

photo by Alper Çuğun (illustrir) CC 2010

This field consists of wearable devices that measure characteristics of the human body and/or the environment by means of sensors. The accompanying web part often consists of data visualisation and analysis of what has been measured.

Examples: Eco Sensor, Fitbit, Nike+, Rationalizer, Switch2Health

2—Ambient intelligence

Intelligent systems that operate in the background (therefore being ambient) within an environment without people noticing it. These systems often consist of multiple sensors and actuators communicating with each other.

Example: Smart Home

3—Ubimedia

The world of Ubimedia is all about tagged objects, mostly by means of RFID-tags, AR-tags or QR-codes. Readers must be used to retrieve the information within the tags. These readers can be mobile phones, RFID readers etc. The information that’s being retrieved is mostly URLs, linking to rich internet content.

Examples: Skål

4—Identification

Retrieving the identity of an object (think of packages in mailing logistics) is increasingly done with the help of web databases. Mostly through RFID-tags an object is scanned and matched with an online database to retrieve its identity. A spin-off group of this field consists of so-called ‘digital business cards’. They swap contact information and identities of social accounts between persons.

Examples: Poken, My Name is E

5—Navigation & location

Navigating while on the road involves GPS and physical interfaces for pinpointing your location. Dynamic information such as traffic info is downloaded directly from the web, which makes these systems true Meta Products.

Examples: TomTom

6—Monitoring & tracking

Monitoring and tracking systems often consist of a combination of sensors that measure the condition or the state of certain objects. The results are uploaded and plotted in a web interface. Much like the sensing wearables, but instead, these systems focus not so much on the human body, but moreover on objects and their environments.

Examples: eco:Drive, SenseAware

7—Toys & games

An evergrowing group in Meta land is the one of toys and games. Combining physical products with the web in whatever kind of way seems to open up great opportunities for both toys and games.

Examples: AR.Drone, Nabaztag, Siftables, SmartUs, Social Mutator, Webkinz