Nov. 16, 2005— Grain-sized semiconductors could one day be sprayed onto surfaces like paint onto walls to give computers access to places previously out of reach.

The so-called Specknet combines sensing, computer processing and wireless communication to link the physical and digital world in a kind of computational aura.

Thousands of tiny computers could be used for a variety of applications ranging from detecting structural failures in aircraft wings, to rehabilitating stroke victims, to capturing body motions for use in animations.

"Because they are so small, you can extend computing and sensing to areas that couldn't be reached before," said D.K. Arvind, professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Speckled Computing consortium, which draws on the expertise of researchers from five universities.

"The real strength of their program is the interdisciplinary approach," said Roger Meike, senior director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif.

"Other people may just be focused on wireless communication or the sensor and those are important and feed into the other disciplines, but they are so interdependent that all of these different things have to play together," he said.

Until now, traditional sensor networks have been deployed over a wide area to sense data — for example, temperature — and then transmit the information at regular intervals over a few yards, or a few miles, to a central computer hub.

That translates into higher battery and transmission costs.

"The rule of thumb is that it is ten times more expensive to process a byte of data remotely than process it locally," said Arvind.