After walking around in the software-landscape for almost 40 years Theo de Ridder decided recently to work the coming years as an artistic programmer on his opus magnum. This will be a quest for Pythonic harmonics with many surprising spin-offs. He is also involved with DevLab, a small research institute where twelve hi-tech SME companies join unorthodox precompetative research with universities and polytechnics. The main theme is large-scale ambient sensor networks with projects like a mechatronic butterfly and haptic electronic clay.
Ambient sensor networks represent distributed systems that challenge the illusion that Moore's law will always facilitate more complex software in the near future. The need for extreme low power consumption in myriads of miniscule sensors is a driving force to reduce software again to its basics. It appears that good old concepts enable new animals like hopping and gossiping nano-agents. However, a lot of validating data-mining experiments are yet to be done to understand and control behaviour of sensor clouds in realistic ambient environments. While Blender is a very powerful development tool for rendered and animated 3D worlds, the capabilities of its interfaces are underestimated as a perfect front-end for interactive real-time data-mining in 3D. In particular attractive are non-overlapping windows, synchronized multiple views, fast UV-mapping of textures, and of course the complete transparency within Python. Together with appscript and numpy it is possible to create a small idyllic framework for seamless integration of real-time data from sensors and web cams with distributed virtual graphical models.