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Clothes Make the Network
Roland Piquepaille writes "Howard Rheingold is looking at how "wearable computers create ad-hoc wireless communities." Here is the main idea, introduced by Gerd Kortuem, a 38-year-old assistant professor, who recently moved to Lancaster University in England from the University of Oregon's Wearable Computing Lab. "As he sees it, the crowds who surround us every day constitute a huge waste of social capital. If you live in a city for instance, there are many who pass within a few yards of you each day who could give you a ride home, buy an item you're trying to sell, or consider you as dating material. Dynamic networking makes it possible to tap those resources through a momentary alliance among transient interest groups." Check this column for a summary or the full article if you have more time."
This new solution will take the work out of driving, dating, and purchases.
...shit, I'll have nothing to do!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Not quite the same thing, but equally frightening.
that the "borg weekly" ran 250 years ago.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I was thinking about this last week with a couple of friends. With the new mobile phones that are being released which have Java capabilities, it would likely be trivial to write an app which would scan your area for other bluetooth devices running the same app, and do a comparison of the data you've entered to see if you are a match. Whether you are looking to buy or sell something, find a ride, or find a date, you could enter this info into your phone, and when it finds another in range with matching interests, it can beep/vibrate/send your photo to the other phone/etc.
Unfortunately, I think the latest java compliant nokia doesn't have bluetooth, and my t68i doesn't have java. I think the Ericsson P800 is going to have both, and siemens is supposed to be releasing a new one in january that I think has both of these features. The real barrier to this is getting people to install it on their phones, most people aren't technical enough to know how to do it, most people aren't going to pay for the app so it would have to be free, but probably the best way would be to convince some wireless provider to just preload it on their phones and advertise it as a feature to get more customers. Which may not be so hard to do since it's a very interesting use of technology which real people may have an interest in, and it shouldn't be hard to design either.
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Yeah a HUD will work great when driving. Trying to read an email and drive 65mph at the same time?
Who says you have to read emails while driving? Think new applications. You could receive audiovisual driving instructions, alerts, traffic updates, etc. Traffic signs could broadcast a wireless signal so you see them a mile away no matter if they are covered in snow or grime.
In general, the main thing about about wearable computing is about improving the user interfaces. A T9 keypad and an LCD display the size of your thumb just don't cut it.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
It's a novel concept, but I see limited future for it. Most worthwhile conversations originate spontaneously.
;)
It is just not possible to have a computer choose for you who you want to talk with. If it misjudges, false alarms will cause clumsy and/or embarrasing situations.
What if you just dont feel like talking and forget to turn it off? Or perhaps it suggests a perfect personallity match, but when you look at the selected person you want to throw up?
Imagine the most likely common scenario that you walk past someone, your device goes off, their device goes off, but for whatever reason you just arent interested to make conversation. Itll be clumsy just ignoring it, or making up excuses.
And even when both sides are willing just to meet random people and talk. It's clumsy and hardly romantic trying to initiate a conversation "hey babe, my beeper just went off, turns out we have a lot in common, wanna f*ck?"
The only use for personal ad-hoc networking technology is in exams
Saying that, widespread use of WLAN devices carried around your person would have one major use - if it supported routing and dynamic route calculation. It could become a free wireless internet. If you wanted to call someone accross the other end of the town, imagine the decice finding a route from person to person, to whomever you are calling... or to the nearest internet gateway...
Okay, after further thought. . .
Depending on the range of the devices, it might be possible to simply ignore all messages from more than n hops away. That would cut way down on the number of generalized messages you received.
The article also mentions a sort of "trusting system" that might be useful in filtering out the noise. For example, if the broadcaster had a cryptographically signed certificate verifying that he/she had actually used this method to find a dozen dates or so, your "assistant" would be much more likely to accept the message as being worth your time, and bringing it to your attention.
The certificate could be even more detailed, so that it was possible to verify any piece of information they were broadcasting. It would be nice if I had a digital certificate from the DMV saying that I was over 21, and didn't need to be carded. [1] Or a certificate from the community college attesting to my education. In case I'm ever called upon to mediate a dispute over the implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. [2]
It would be interesting to live in a world where these devices were commonplace. These sound like one of those ideas where nobody's sure how they'll work exactly, but it seems likely that they will be useful for more things than we could imagine.
1) Actually, it might take a while to work out the kinks so that it could be used for legal purposes. In the mean time, I'd suddenly find myself having to show evidence that it's really *my* PDA.
2) It could happen.
In light of the FBI's claim that wireless networks are terrorist tools.
This type of mesh networking is the the ultimate in P2P networking. The FBI can't install their Carnivore network sniffer in a prevasively meaningful way in such a system.
I think, therefore, ken_i_m