We once witnessed a plant’s reaction with a lie detector to someone’s bending one of its leaves and were pretty impressed that the plant exhibited stress. But Midori-san, a Sweetheart Hoya, makes that look juvenile in comparison. Satoshi Kuribayashi of KAYAK has developed sophisticated technology that allows the house plant to blog on line. With surface potential sensors, it measures changes such as temperature, vibration, and nearby humans. An algorithm translates that data into Japanese sentences that make up the blog. You can monitor Midor-san and offer it a dose of light through it's site, seems to lose something with the translation.
Official site of Midori-san
The plant interface system, which is built around technology developed by Satoshi Kuribayashi at the Keio University Hiroya Tanaka Laboratory, uses surface potential sensors to read the weak bioelectric current flowing across the surface of the leaves. This natural current fluctuates in response to changes in the immediate environment, such as temperature, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic waves and nearby human activity. A specially developed algorithm translates this data into Japanese sentences, which are used as fodder for the plant’s daily blog posts.
Midori-san started blogging about a week ago. So far, the plant’s highly structured posts summarize the day’s weather, temperature and lighting conditions, describe its overall physical condition, tell how much light it received via the user-activated lamp (see below), and explain how much fun the day was. Each post also includes a self-portrait photo and a plant-themed pun (in Japanese), which Midori-san likely did not write. A graph at the top of the sidebar shows the plant’s surface potential in real-time.
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