Problems faced in developing an amorphous computer as an intelligent skin for pervasive computing

Futurists predict the use of Smart Matter, nano-technology with computational ability, as pervasive. It will be painted on the surfaces of our environments, and the futurists suggest that these surfaces will be used as video displays, user interfaces, and sensor arrays. The implication is that a coat of paint will be enough to add this functionality to a surface. The field of Amorphous Computing provides one possible realisation of this vision; an amorphous computer is a multitude of identical tiny computers with local communication capability, and can be painted onto a surfa ce to form an ad hoc network. An iSurface is a specialised version of an amorphous computer, using a simulator with a physical grounding. In this paper we argue that such a vision of Intelligent Surfaces is fundamentally flawed. The load, both in terms of processing and communication, on the individual elements will always be a hindrance to responsivenes s of iSurface applications, and we present experimentation on several applications to demonstrate this.