Louise Shannon from the V&A pointed me to pachube.com, a site that enables you to connect sensors in the real world to each other and to virtual worlds. Similar to the principle of Dual Reality, the service makes it possible for a virtual world (like Second Life) to mirror what’s happening in the real one, and for many people to stay aware of the conditions in one place. Unfortunately most of the data on the site consists of weather feeds, but a few interesting directions are being explored: the site hosts a number of pollution sensors in Beijing set up for the Olympics as well as a hurricane sensor in the gulf and this Geiger counter in an unfortunate Japanese researcher’s laboratory (above). The way pachube aggregates any and all feeds in a single site points the way toward mash-ups of the real and the physical that are open to anyone to see, interpret and account for.