Category: Tech

How he does it
(Offerings of fruit and flowers in Mark’s general direction)

In recent months, I’ve gotten involved in a number of interesting and exciting projects.
Trouble is, they all involve sets of logins and passwords. Some have assigned logins and passwords, so I can’t use the usual combinations. Even before the new set of projects, my standard procedure for infrequently-used services had degenerated into to using the hint and getting a new password every single time!
I have completely scaled out of the creaky password management methods I’ve had till now.
I need a forearm-based implant that stores all my passwords, so I have them with me, whether or not I have access to any particular computing device.
Or maybe something a little less extreme.
How about a bracelet, with an LCD readout and a scroll-wheel that you can use to select System:Username:Password combinations?
There could be fashionable versions (precious metals, licensed characters). There could be simple versions, like medical alert tags, that guys could feel comfortable with.
Anybody know a good cyborgification service. Or a designer and contract manufacturer?
Or a better idea for managing more passwords than my simple brain can hold?

Ross Mayfield blogged a good article in Popular Science by Steve Ditlea that helps illustrate the points that I was trying to make the other day about augmented reality.
Ditlea describes AR technology as providing additional information to the visual field, enabling soldiers, doctors, and techicians to work more effectively.

With AR, you’ll simply slip on a tiny visor and guided repair instructions will appear next to each under-the-hood part that you gaze at: “Now that you’ve disconnected the radiator hose, move it to one side and unscrew the carburetor cap.”

Eventually, Ditlea predicts, this will be available to the rest of us:

“And when AR headgear does shrink down to the size of common glasses, it could be a must for up-and-coming managers, to avoid career or social gaffes at business meetings and cocktail parties. Everyone will be packing extra data in their spectacles. Each time you look at someone across a conference table or a crowded room, information about who they are and what their background is could appear before your eyes.”

All of these examples are factual data provided to the individual. The second example is the image that I was talking about earlier — a person getting secret information that gives them advantages over the other people in the room.
This is very different from the story Greg Elin told about Aaron Swartz and Cory Doctorow hanging out on a couch at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, chatting with each other in person while also sending aside comments, checking references, and forwarding code snippets on the computers in their hands.
Aaron and Cory are getting an overlay of internet data, and using this as a source and a channel for their conversation.
So this is what I meant. In popular science, augmented reality is data informing and isolating the individual. In life as we’re living it, augmented reality is data informing the connections between people, and the cyborg — the part-human, part-machine entity — is a conversation.
(We’ll leave Prof. Mann out of it for now, since Abe Books cancelled my order for his book, so it’s over to Half.com. )

A design team at Ideo has brainstormed and built five prototypes of features to make mobile phones less socially rude.
The most disturbing on the list is this one, which doesn’t seem to reduce the amount of rudeness in the universe:

For example, the first phone, called SoMo1, gives its user a mild electric shock, depending on how loudly the person at the other end is speaking. This encourages both parties to speak more quietly, otherwise the mild tingling becomes an unpleasant jolt.

via BJ Fogg’s class on Captology

Facts corrected. My impression of Professor Mann comes from (always-flawed) press coverage; glad to hear from human beings in person!
It’s very interesting to hear that the real cyborg experience is a community, which is different from the media and commercial stereotype.
My commentary about the cyborg is more about the popular image, and less about Professor Mann’s book, as he and his students are saying loud and clear!
I do think there’s a difference between common popular and commercial images of augmented reality that isolate the individual; and some emerging kinds of communication tools — including, it sounds like, Prof. Mann’s work.
I haven’t read the book yet, though it is certainly now on my list.
p.s. The book is out of print, but I just picked up a used copy at ABE Books, and there are more in stock at Half.com

From conversation with Greg Elin:
The typical image of augmented reality is MIT University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, who walks around with a special set of glasses that feed him data about the world around him. You know its cold, he knows it’s 17 degrees out. You can see that the Verazzano Narrows is a long bridge, he can see that the main span is 4260 feet long between towers.
The cyborg is smarter than the rest of us; he can correct our facts; and the extra data separates him from others around him.
At Clay Shirky’s Social Software conference last fall, the physical reality of the conference — the speaker talking, verbal comments — was augmented by people chatting online, projected to a big screen for folks without laptops. (Greg modified Manual Kiessling’s A Really Simple Chat Client for the experiment).
Interruptive comments were diverted to screen; people checked references and took notes and passed notes (in the 6th grade sense).
Augmented reality is experienced and created by a group of people, not an isolated individual. There are many places around the world where text messages on mobile phones are used this way (see Rheingold’s Smart Mobs if you haven’t read it already or don’t live there).
In the Steve Mann image, the cyborg is an isolated being, made less connected by a stream of data.
In the Clay Shirky conference room, and the world of augmented reality we’re starting to live in, the cyborg is a conversation.

Phil Wolff wrote a while back about how weblogs are going to evolve into a converged client, with attributes of weblogs, email, IM, PIM, presentation, word processor, newsreader, video editor, workflow manager, and a couple of other things in the pot for good measure.
I agree in part, and disagree vehemently in part. The many modes of human communication are all used together to support the relationships we have and the work we’re doing. There should be interfaces and touchpoints among the media; a common inbox for daily activities, common memory spaces for the things we want to remember in the context we want to remember them.
But an interface is a tool designed for a purpose. There is no way I want the controls required to edit video before me unless I want to be editing video right now. I don’t want lots of screen real estate taken up by publishing widgets when I just want to write and post three sentences. This is why Microsoft Office feels like it’s gotten progressively worse; there are too many potatoes in the sack.
Phil writes: “Are you presenting on a computer projector, a video stream, or paper? The software should understand how to adjust.”
Respectfully, Phil, I don’t want software to guess whether I’m trying to edit a video — this is an even more nightmarish version of Microsoft clippy, which obsequiously tries to write your business letters for you.
There’s a reason people like publish with using Blogger and MovableType.
Simple is good.
The hard part is not going to be tying all of these things together.
The hard part is going to be maintaining simple entry points to the underlying complexity.

In a comments thread” to Peterme’s post on regional blogs, Dan Lyke suggested a geo-linked hiking blog: “a big collaborative map that’d have information that no single map publisher can put out right now”

Right now I’m carrying a GPS along when I go hiking or biking, then downloading the track points. My thought initially was that it’d just be nice to have enough GPS data that I can say “I took a photo close to there” and start to attach latitude/longitude information to my photo database.
But I’m doing this with Un*x through various cool but non “user friendly” means, if I can find easy ways for more people to do and set up some sort of application to annotate and manage these tracks a little better, then we could also start to build a big collaborative map that’d have information that no single map publisher can put out right now, and with data of which a good bit of which probably doesn’t exist in digital form.

I wonder if the GeoURL is part of the solution. This is a service that creates meta tags for geographical co-ordinates. I wonder how they specify location, and whether it would be precise enough to locate waterfalls?
GeoURL is Slashdotted right now, so I can’t tell.
The conversational thread has continued on Dan’s site.

via Slashdot
The article uses examples mostly from developer-oriented projects like Linux and Gnome.
Some of their premises seem obsolete. There are new generations of open source software being designed for humans, not just arch-geeks. Examples include weblog software: MovableType; and email/PIM software: Spaces, OSAF. These projects deliberately consider usability.
On the other hand, some of their suggestions are interesting, such as:
* providing tools for users to report usability issues
* creating packaged remote usability tests for users
* enabling bug-tracking systems to incorporate graphical and video
content (apparently Bugzilla discussions of interface issues require
creating ASCII art
* being more welcome to HCI practitioners
The discussion is very academic in tone. The article would be more compelling if the authors had actually tried to, say, contact the core Mozilla team and offered to implement their ideas.

says Pete Kaminski.