Primitives

Learn about the distinction between weak and strong phygitality, and explore how programmable, code-like material is currently a utopian concept.

Weak and Strong Phygitality

Below present a set of components basic for any phygitality and identical in any of its configurations.

Call phygitality such a process of linking digital and technical entities whose minimal condition is the simultaneity of their state changes. If this condition is met, but the material part of the object does not adopt all the properties of the virtual one, or is deprived of its plasticity and replicability, the phygitality is weak. If met and adopts, it is strong.

In other words, in the first case, the physical constraints remain in force; in the second, they do not, for the technical item in question is programmable just like a programme. Its atoms are the material code. Unfortunately, this option is utopian today.

PAL as Connection

The phygital abstraction provides this connection. It refers at once to chipped things and their digital equivalents, as well as to the software environment capable of inputting, outputting and modifying information in them. In this way, everything that happens in the three mentioned domains becomes unified and controlled.

So above them all appears the next level that sets a new objectivity. Its ideation is a phygital object, or one whose physical and digital sides are in one-to-one correspondence. Its associated milieu is a set of standards for categorising its possible types. Due to this latter, a phygital object is discernible and manipulable for users and other agents (e.g. databases).

In this context, the cryptographic protocol is responsible for its formalisation and universalisation, as well as for the operations performed with it. Anyone can tap into this system and materialise the virtual in their own way.