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Have Your Family Gather 'Round the Virtual Table
Ridgelift writes "A new device is helping families and loved ones feel connected even when they're far apart. Part of the Media Lab's Habitat project, a pair of 'cyber-tables' are equipped with radio tag readers, projectors and computers running on Linux and Macintosh operating systems. 'Habitat's designers say the system can give people a sense of what their loved ones are up to and perhaps even how they are feeling'."
I sure hope they don't put one of these things in my girlfriend.. I'd hate to have to explain to my grandparents at the next family meeting...
could become flame-wars instead. I KNEW that all that time I wasted on usenet and irc would eventually pay off!
Because I have an idea for an virtual crapper that will cause log grahics to appear in the receive toilet. When I have to stop and think what message I'm sending tossing my keys on the table, that's where I draw the virtual line. If you want to see how someone far away is doing, here's a suggestion: Road trip!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
A better solution might be to use a high-res digital camera that takes snapshots of the actual kitchen table, extracts changes in the scene, and transmits that.
This would be superior to the RFID appoach because it allows the inclusion of ordinary and arbitrary objects. If you receive a greeting card from a loved-one, you place it on the table to show that you appreciated it. In contrast, the RFID approach requires someone to both tag any new object and create a simulacra of it for display on the other end. Rather than people creating a symbolic language from the default icons in the system (e.g., the default coffee cup, cigarette pack, etc.), the high-res image fragments could include very personal items such as the actual greeting card, a favorite coffee cup, or a meaningful momento.
Image differencing and extraction would reduce the bandwidth requirements to below that required for videoconferencing. Even if a high-res (5 megapixel) imager is used, the image extraction algorithms would work to only transmit image fragments of objects that changed but stayed in place for some time. Thus, it might transmit a single snapshot of your bowl of cereal in the morning, but not any images from when you quickly opened and closed the kitchen cabinets.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You need to visit the real world a bit more, and spend less time online.
Have you ever experienced the solitude of camping in the great forests alone? Have you ever spent more than 8 hours free from civilization's grasp?
Your brain jacked into the net? With the current state of the net, you would spend all of your time ignoring Spam, blocking script kiddies "hacks" and modding down jerks from Slashdot trolling the FP, Yoda and goatse.cx posts. When will your overloaded braincells have time to experience Gibson's fantasies? How would you guard your innermost dreams from the omnipresent government and NGO watchdogs?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to my simulated first person virtual world called "real life."
Simstim can never replace reality, I can hike a glacier in Alaska, sleep on a beach in Belize, shop the East gate Market in Seoul, or just drive in the first-snow traffic jam anywhere in North America, and I know that the experiences are unique to me.
Nothing can simulate the random chaos of nature, since everything is but a creation of nature.