ABSTRACT
Underwater sensing will potentially change its form substantially
over the coming decades as widely scattered sensing devices
become more and more practically feasible. Those many-point
sensing systems could provide a temporally consistent view into
the depths of our oceans for the first time. Maritime sciences
as well as ocean engineering applications will gradually change
their character from the still dominant expensive, large, single-
unit systems to inexpensive, small, multidevice systems. There is
an apparent parallelism to the transition from central mainframe
computers to billions of scattered, tiny microcontrollers, where
miniaturization and production efficiency substantially changed
the character of the general computer industry over the last four
decades.
