Presented by Josh Clark.
- We’ve gotten very good at bridging gaps online. Information flows freely around the world.
- How do we deal with these physical gaps between our devices?
- 90% of people who have more than one device accomplish tasks across multiple screens
- RCA’s wireless remote controlled television from 1961
Sequential Tasks
- Apple’s Continuity feature closes the gaps between devices.
- Google’s Deep Shot (video) is one attempt at migrating tasks across devices in a sequential way.
Simultaneous Tasks
- Google’s Racer Chrome Experiment
- WebRTC, peer-to-peer, web sockets without the server in the middle.
It’s not enough to share content across devices. We need to share action. We want to sync verbs, not just nouns.
- Building blocks: Web Sockets, WebRTC, Bluetooth LE
- Boris Smus’ ultrasonic networking and sonicnet.js
Physical Interaction
- Interacting with gadgets in ways that are more natural and more in line with how we interact with the physical world.
- DrumPants
- Misfit Shine has you place the device on your smartphone screen to sync. This accommodates shortcomings in the physical design (made of aluminum) that inhibited long-distance Bluetooth communciation.
We need to make our devices more social.
- Happy Together app, source code available on GitHub
- Aral Balkan’s The Boat That Hacked screen grabbing hack
It’s not a challenge of technology. It’s a challenge of imagination.
- New kinds of input devices: Myo armband, Logbar’s Ring, and Leap Motion
Never try to out-mouse the mouse
- How do we use new inputs to talk to devices? What can we do that the mouse can’t do?
- The Leap Motion can point at stuff that’s not on the screen, bridging the gap between physical and digital.
Physical and Digital
- Rom’s interactive Leap Motion Displays
- Use devices to pull up information about garments in real time in a retail context. Bringing the online shopping experience to the physical shopping experience.
- The Internet of Things: digital becomes physical and physical becomes digital
- The Mimo Baby Monitor is either creepy or amazing. Gives a digital avatar to a newborn.
- Mundane Computing: trivial improvements to devices (e.g. a WiFi-enabled microwave that simply keeps the time correct)
- Teddy Ruxpin was an attempt at a social toy, but failed due to the limitations of available technology. Now, we can have truly social toys like those available from Toymail.
- Software makes hardware scale. Teddy Ruxpin was limited to the available cassettes. Software lets hardware be an avatar for people. Software scales the lifespan and durability of the hardware.
- LG HomeChat
Software is ideology, embedded with values. It’s political (in terms of worldview).
- Honor intention, but don’t assume it. We often confuse context with intention. They aren’t the same!
- Intentional, Passive, and Social Interactions: The key is to successfully combine all three.
Amplify human connection. Bend technology to our lives and not the reverse.
Designing for the Future
- Plan for gadget hopping in your service. Know that 2/3rds of your shoppers will complete the task across devices.
- Share action and tasks across devices.
- Lean on peer-to-peer sharing. Sometimes you don’t need the network.
- Move interactions off the screen and into the world around us.
- Design for sensors and use them as the interface.
- Everything can have an avatar, a digital representation for us to manipulate. We can have a semi-social relationship with our devices, appliances, etc.