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Re: Unconventional wearable usage

 From: Pete Hardie <>
>Two ideas leap to mind as nifty, but untested.
>
>1) true Cyranoids
>	Need to deal with a car salesman, but hate haggling?  Got a friend
>	who loves it? Get friend familiar with what you want/need/can afford,
>	and go to the dealership with him across the street, both of you with
>	wearables.  Friend has audio and video slaved to yours.  He feeds you
>	dialog and/or pointers to bargain.  Add in the usefulness of web
>	search for reasonable prices.

Neat idea, but impractical in implementation until the data you want to
access (the web pages) are ultra fast, or if you sit down with a huge
spreadsheet and the data pre-calculated and formatted.

Even if you had a T-1 link to your head, you're talking several seconds
access time, and in several seconds, people can easily talk several
sentences off.

I've tried accessing our internal bug system via a laptop in meetings,
but unless I pre-fetch the data, retrieving the bug data is very slow;
10 seconds is just way too long. They've already finished discussing
that bug and have moved onto the next one, even though the discussion
was like "well, I think this bug was about XYZ, and I think Joe
Programmer has fixed it..."

inter-person communication bandwidth is just magnatudes larger than any
data network.  How do you quantify human communication bandwidth,
anyways?

>2) pseudo-telepathy 'hive mind'
>	Have several wearable users hooked up via text or voice, in constant
>	communication during a dsitributed task.  Use subvocal mikes to allow
>	near-silent speech/

this more or less already exists, at least in the text sense.  irc,
muds, or any of the other chat systems.

The real breakthrough would be live document editing, i.e. several
people editing main.c at the same time and somewhere a central compile
kicking off at specified points when all active editing users indicate
it's okay to try and compile.

What other tasks could be improved?

I've thought about our internal QA department.  They spend large
amounts of time in the lab, and when they need to make a bug report,
they either try and submit it from the machine they're on (assuming
it's still alive), from the machine sitting right next to it (assuming
that you can find a working machine in the lab), or they go back to
their desks.

One of the major problems is that you have no history about the
machine. You don't know what has historically been running on the
machine, what software changes have happened lately, and more.  Sure
this could be kept in a central repository on the web somewhere, but
how would you access it?

What I was thinking would be to use an ID chip like the ibutton, or
something simpler, and users would have a wearable and when then touch
the identification button, they would have instant access to the
machine's history; what OSes it's been running and what hardware
problems it's had, etc.

Additionally, there's lots of little things that could be added.
Teaching everyone how to use chording keyboards, however, is
prohibitive in this environment.  It would have to use some sort of
normal keyboard and mouse, perhaps something more like a digitizing
notepad with a barcode scanner.  They lack tabletop space in the lab,
but I'm sure something could be done about that.

I suppose what these people need is reliable portable access in the
lab, so they can reliably access their notes and data from any point in
the lab.  The only addition is an "instant link" from the machine to
the database, so a barcode is more than enough, although you could just
use the low tech signs hanging on the front of the machines (there's
only 100 or so machines in the test lab) and number them with 3 digits:
001..999 .

Hm, what other tasks lend themselves well to a hive mind.  Newsreading,
I suppose does.  Especially if you're doing some sort of moderating.
The only downside to this is that you don't need to moderate for long
periods of time, perhaps a few minutes per day, or an hour per day if
you're on a particularly busy list.  But yes, I can definitely see this
as a good group task.

Trade Show Floor browsing is good - hams already do this with straight
voice data, but it would be wonderful to have something like irc with
scrollback - you can see something that someone mentioned several
minutes ago, plus the neat new thing in front of you, and put one and
one together and get a complete thing.  Same for flea markets, etc.

At the flea market, you might have a group of common people, but they
have no relation to each other.  The key enabling technology here would
be automatic networking.  the ham's have it easy, all they need is a
frequency.  For computers, it's much more complex; the hardware has to
talk, as well as the software.

Anyways, yes, interesting ideas, but there's much work that needs to be
done on collaborative software before people can make good use of being
constantly connected.

   - Kevin Wang

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