What are spimes? The word ’spime’ is a neologism invented and made popular by author, columnist, and speaker Bruce Sterling in his book ‘Making Things’, and it represents a new category of objects.

According to the restricted definition adopted by OpenSpime, an object is a spime if it has:

• a GPS unit, or other location-aware technologies to know where it is, and when it is
• communcation capabilities with the Internet, directly, or through gateways
• memory for storing its data until it can communicate
• a sensor, to measure a value about the world around it.

Most mobile phones today, for example are spimes, and similarly, most of the car-navigation units are not spimes, as they have no sensor to perceive the physical world.

Starting to categorize the various classes of spimes, we tend to call an object sharing similar characteristics with car navigation systems of today Category 0 Spime, while we tend to call one which has a sensor measuring the value of a parameter in the world around it Category 1 Spime.