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.