An accelerating energy crisis in the oil and gas industry is driving development and investment in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies, according to a recently published report by ON World.

“While profits are high, the cost of doing business is increasing and oil and gas supplies are becoming more difficult and expensive to find and exploit,” says Mareca Hatler, ON World’s Director of Research. “This has accelerated demand for wireless sensing and control solutions in this industry, representing a cumulative Total Potential Market (TPM) of 25 million units worldwide.”

This has accelerated demand for wireless sensing and control solutions in this industry, representing a cumulative Total Potential Market (TPM) of 25 million units worldwide. ON World’s recent survey of senior managers with the world’s leading oil and gas companies found that 35% are current wireless sensor users and nearly half plan to investigate WSN within the next 18 months. While most of the current WSN sales are for refineries and petrochemical plants, exploration and production, pipelines, and transportation are the most disruptive opportunities for new entrants. Some of the largest WSN innovations areas are pipeline internal corrosion monitoring, automated offshore platforms, advanced geological survey technologies, and nanotechnologies for advanced extraction techniques.

More info here.

Strix Systems today announced that state-run Korean Highway Corp. (KHC) selected Strix Access/One® Outdoor Wireless System (OWS) as the winner for the intelligent highway infrastructure test bed, the multi-phase, multi-year nationwide highway project between Korea’s two largest cities of Seoul and Pusan.

The purpose of the projects is to determine a cost effective method, in contrast to legacy cellular services, for Korea’s intelligent, interactive, digital highway infrastructure to deliver multimedia applications to a wide range of end-user, vehicular and other Wi-Fi enabled devices. The system will enable the delivery of video surveillance and voice streamed to and from public safety and commuter vehicles and provide the architecture for a simplified communications infrastructure for traffic control and related systems.

More info here.

From www.stanza.co.uk:

I have two wireless sensor networks, one using motes Mica 2 and MTS 310 and the other using motes Iris with 420cc boards, both are fifteen motes in size. I am using these to take the data and make experimental but real time data visualisations that I call art but have cross over potential into other college departments ie urban design, computing and architecture. I am the AHRC research fellow and my studio is in Goldsmiths College, London. From here I can switch my networks on. In both set ups, I take the data and present it online in real time feeds iusing php and xml for input into flash and java based interfaces. There are several projects on my website that use motes that you might find of interest including “sensity” , “house”, “gallery”, see www.stanza.co.uk. Indeed these outputs are live data visualisations of various environments.

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