There’s long been talk of what John Seely Brown dubs “ecological computing” and what others call “pervasive computing” – the use of a multitude of wireless sensors to hook the physical world up to the Internet – but not much has come of the idea to date. That may be about to change, though, as the cost of sensors falls, as scientists learn more deploying them in the environment, and as military and commercial applications proliferate.

The Associated Press today has an interesting article about the work going on at UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, which has a big grant from the National Science Foundation to pioneer the deployment of so-called “wireless motes” that can be used to monitor physical spaces. The center’s headquarters is covered with

dozens of miniature, low-resolution cameras and sensors. They’re wirelessly linked to computers throughout the 6,000-square-foot space, keeping tabs on traffic flow in public areas and monitoring temperature, humidity and acoustics. The building serves as a testing ground for developing and perfecting wireless sensing technology to connect major chunks of the real world to the Internet.

The technology is “quickly catching on,” says the article, “attracting the attention of the military, academics and corporations. Just as the Internet virtually connected people with personal computers, the prospect of wireless arrays sprinkled in buildings, farmland, forests and hospitals promise[s] to create unprecedented links between people and physical locations.

Such monitoring also, of course, raises a lot of security and privacy issues, which researchers are struggling to address. Another big obstacle is the lack of standards, as most of the systems built so far are incompatible with one another. Nevertheless, startups in this space, like Dust Networks and Arch Rock, may finally start reaping some big commerical rewards. The walls, it seems, will soon have eyes.