combine sleep quality monitoring app with music app, and build a recommender system for songs most likely to send you to sleep quickly (or not...)
You want to hide the display (or parts of it) from some peope in the room - give them switchable polarized glasses, and then polarize light vertical or horizontal from areas of screen, and switch between horizontal and vertical for those allowed/forbidden from seeing those areas:)
Drops of high viscosity stuff you put on your device camera's lens to give it temporary 270 degree vision...
P2P, Ad Hoc, you're in the supermarket and you're panic sets in - where are your kids - you send an encrypted picture to the supermarket (fixed or guards' cameras) surveillance cameras who do a privacy preserving multiparty computation to locate your errant childrens. Same thing works for looking for bewildered grandma, or indeed, finding your car in the airport carpark - or indeed, finding where you left the TV remote last nite (with use of baby camera drones). use of enclaves and weak homomorphic crypto in training the binary neural net for extra marks...(note, no-one retains the picture - its just added into the model for temporary matching - using non-reversable training).
You know how annoying and intrusive all those Voice Assistants are - alexei, syri, cortina etc - all listening in the whole time and spying on you?
so what you need is to run interference and I have the solution - it is a pocket size really noisy drone/quadcopter, that homes in on anything that has that annoying voice, and just hovers in front of it (like running a tap or shower in a spy ovie) to drown out any sound of your conversation - it can be specialyl designed to make just the right sort of pinko noise that confuses the hell out of the useless AI that they have sitting just inside the echo chamber box.
Instead of 3D printing, what you want is a 3D marker pen- you sketch what you want in the air, and "autocomplete" snaps the surfacs to regular polyhedra or 3D spines, and then rounds them off - voila, you can magic stuff out of thin air - you heard it here first, Merlin on a budget.
After the challenge of flocking, now we have the power-weight ratio hill to climb to build a drone out of completely edible components. Obviously the key problem is how to make rotos/motors - my solution (yet to be tried) would employ Hero's Engines. Back in hugh school chemistry class, we used to make these as an exercise in glass blowing: by replacing glass with (say) Icing Sugar (or anything reasonably rigid), and replacing heat and boiling water with liquid oxygen (boiling at room temperature), we can make this thing fly. The rest is just a case of making a realy light (and quite strong) souffle.
GlueSB - Gloves with USBRFI - all USB capable devices should have RFI in - so then we can find them by scanning (same idea as earlier one - all (rechargeable) batteries should have RFI in - then they can emit a little signal to say how much charge they have left and uniquely id themselves - and be findable - so never lose your remote ever again. application - GlueSB - gloves with USB in - two apps in mind - 1/. if you drop a glove, it sets of an alarm on your phone so you notice there and then rather than an hour later 2/ you can have heated gloves 3/ the gloves could have LED lights that plug into your route finder on your phone, so when cycling, they flash to tell you where to turn at intersections.
Printing spreadsheets is a pain. There's so many times when you only want some rows&columns and not a lot of others. but hand selecting them is painful too. how abotu we just track where people look most often, and just fade out all the other places than re-flow? Voila, Eye tracking could be used to do 3D printing too. Think of it like mind-over-matter, or cybersculpting - although error corrections might be trickier.
You know when you're walking along and someone coming the other way locks gaze with you but you can't figure out to go left or right (because that's exactly what they are figuring at the same time)? You know when you are learning to ride a bike, and you over thin balancing, or when you are learning to control a clutch on a shift car, and you bounce along? These are all things where feedback loops cause synchronisation, and you want to damp things. Three solutions suggest themselves
The first one is too hard. The last one is evil. However, we can do randomizing - indeed, that is what ends up happening (except when you walk into people, fall off the bike, or stall the car). So what you need is something that distracts you. Like when Douglas Adams was describing how to learn to fly- you throw youself at the ground, and miss (because you are distracted by something too humungous to ignore). Then when you realize you are flying, and that can't work, you need a second distraction. Same trick learning to ride a bike (or drive). So with two (or more) people on the sidewalk too, what's the solution?
How to do this? easy - its called an app. Much better than showing you mixed reality, it shows you something definitely unreal, but only one of you. when you least expect it. Just before you walk into the person who's staring at their boring map or email or fb update. Just before you over balance. It shows you something really surprising. Anything will do - plenty of youtube videos available. Cats falling off bicycles, fish crashing cars, sidewalks full of dead people...that sort of stuff....
Get a programmable stencil, so you can change the pattern of paint coming out of a spraycan, then we can add aestheicodes to any street art -- could use MEMS widgets right in frnt of the nozzle, and then have an app on yr phone to programme the MEMS to add the pattern.
Simple (one-time use) tech would be to use a bunch of dense/small-bubble wrap and the head of a dot matrix printer which could burst the bubbles at x,y coords to reveal you the stencil shape...
new idea for ultra cheap 3D Printing (note this is constrained to shapes that would also be possible with injection mould). take a balloon, and cover it in a grid of heat shrink tape. fill the ballon with liquid (e.g. chocolate, juice whatever). now heat tape at places you want to be shorter, and not elsewhere, and voila, the shape you want. Now put ballon in fridge. When chocolate (or juice) has solidified, tear off the skin, and you have your bunny rabbit shaped easter thing, or endless entertainment for the kids on the beach. warning, do not do this at work.....it will annoy people that spent 3000$ on a naff 3 D printer that has got clogged up with mint choc chip biscuits
Nail art is a big deal - some of it is really complex and expensive because its done for real by artists. A lot of people just get stick-on strips that have pre-done designs on - you can even laser print them. So why not embed aestheticodes in the design, and NFC tags in the sticker? Then applications are galore - my favourite would be a virtual keyboard, using an tablet or phone's camer and NFC reader to see what fingers were where.....but anything with near gesture control would be made potentially much more accurate (plus would potentially be personalised/biometric, so semi-secure).
Imagine a broach which is a small display (with some wireles link to your phone so you choose what to show) - this coule be a Cameo, but it could also include aesthetic codes which would allow people using the app to go fetch information about you that you are (currently) prepared to share - indeed this could be location, time and viewer specific - so at meetings/social events/work, this could allow people to control who could see what about them and when - e.g. nothing, to web/contact info, to actively seeking to meet person X (or person of type X)...
If all batteries, especially rechargeables, from now on, had emitted an RFID token over a wifi (or bluetooth) channel, that had 2 things in it - the ID, and the remaining charge -- we could build apps for phones that could a) find missing remote controls (and other phones) under the sofa etc b) tell you when you need to recharge stuff.... You could have a Harry Potter map of your Smart Things, and dumb old things would be rendered "smart" at one swell foop.
File forgiveness bits - now why don't distributed file systems have forgiveness bits - these are like permission bits, but operate in the opposite direction in time. This allows for consistent treatment of relaxation of policy/mechanism to scale for things like accidental leaks and makes taint tracking properly consistent with threshold security and differential privacy - file under Jesuitical Distributed Systems impossibility results, part III.
I was talking to some folks about wearable computers today -they envisage a network woven into clothes RATHER than wireless - since this reduces the power requirement a lot ... and it occurred to me that such a network would probably be quite sensitive to the magnetic and electrical fields of the earth - now its well known (since a paper in Science back in 1979) that pigeons can detect the gradient of the earths magnetic field and use this to assist navigation - how much date one gets is unknown, but with a few meters of wiring around a person, one ought to be able to do a lot better than a pigeon. or is it just a virtual-pigeon-brained idea?
You've heard of fridge magnets? well these are bluetooth capable webcams you stick on the fridge (inside or out) so that you can look at stuff from remote (if say your home phone is a bluetooth/dect/gsm n-band phone (when oh when will someone ship a gsm/dect home base station thats priced sensibly, eh?)). So inside the fridge, they need to be able to actuate the light too (unless of course you are a true believer and know that the light doesn't really stay out when you close the fridge door:).
So then, from the shop, not recalling if you are clean out of chicken nuglets or smoked salmon, you can from your cell phone, call your fridge (well, you dial home and ask your bluetooth manager gateway to) and ask it to show you whats on each shelf.
cam-let - now there's a neat name:) you stick em here, you stick em there, and see what's going on...
how often is it you can't find the cable to link your mp3/digitalcamera/programmablewatch to your laptop and the Internet? yes, almost daily - so what we want, and we will get it is low cost short haul wireless - now dunno bout you, but 2 of my laptops do bluetooth, as do all 6 cell phones in my house (6 people live here ranging from 7-50 years old). So we don't want them thar wires no more. not if you can help it.
of course someone is gonna shout "security!". well thats why bluetooth is the way it is - true, with wifi, you'd wanna have some sort of ipsec, or higher level vpn , or even just straight ssh tunnel to the device, but hey, that software all exists, all fits in modest chunks of memory, and we are talking about devices that store Gigabytes of music and images, and have respectable audio/video software in - a complex comms stack should be a needle-in-a-haystack - oops- wrong analogy; should be in the noise; oops - still wrong analogy - um, so the comms stack should not be a significant extra burden - they already got USB and other gubbins in there. lets just have an IP bluetooth stack and a secure wifi stack and be done with - you know it makes cents.
its very frustrating when you meet people who have only seen your picture on a web page...esp. if you are pictured there with longer/shorter hair - the solution is the new device the Hairt
this is a scottish sounding device that you put on your head and it has a sensor that detects people by cookies, given them when they last visited your website, and displays the haircut on your head that is most familiar to them - if you meet two people, it morphs the haircut to meet both viewpoints....
in a crowd, it probably does best if it makes it look like you have nits..
The gurl ("grab URL") is a pair of glasses - they possess a small camera AND an overlay display - when you see a URL on a real world object, they capture and OCR it for later upload via irda to your palm/phone.... if another person has seen an object with some interesting symbl on it, they can label the object with that symbol and an associated URL (for example they see a truck with a particularly registration, and want to remind you if you see it to do something (crash into it for example) - so then you see a virtual URL
after we bought you the hairt, and the gurl, now we have the karmalian
this is a piece of material like a j-cloth that can wrap around and stick to anything and then (via bluetooth) receives an image of itself and its surroundings from a "nearby camera" (or even a CIA surveillance satellite) - it then changes color/pattern to as close as possible to the surroundings, thus hiding/concealing what is is wrapped around - initial use is to hide my mug in plain view so people stop stealing it from the staff common room - later projects will incrementally deploy this material over sections of cities to make more and more of them look like the surrounding countryside - with suitable interaction from users, its possible that different people will be able to provide consensus view (some of you might want the countryside to look more like the surrounding city for example...)
a simple application would be with bob rosenburg's virtual keyboard, one could display an keyboard on any surface that one was "typing" on...
(read while listening to primalscream
When you look into someone's eyes, normally, you see yourself reflected (at an reflection angle that is the same to the normal as the angle of incidence, what a coincidence:-)
So with Virtual Eyes (TM), you see someone else reflected - the person that this person was LAST looking at ....
This is useful in negotiations....
This is a new version of a very old game - you have to pin a story on a shoplifter - you have to do it by leaving an audit trail of false data in the surveillance databases around the world to prove that someone who wasn't really there, was.
This is a low cost solution to the problems faced by the higher Echelon's within GCHQ, of trying to keep up with all the latest dotcomeraderie - along the lines proposed by Professor Flan O'Brien (a.k.a. Miles na Gopaleen) in his highly respected work on the Institute, concerning the ventriloquists, the Karmavore is a whispering hidden assistant worn like a cufflink (Think appliance-meets-ms_paperclip, and you cannot go far wrong)- when a word comes up in conversation with an expert, that the assistant knows that the Government Adviser will not know the meaning off, it is quickly emailed off to an expert who then provides live voice - the speech and vocal patterns of the remote expert are on-the-fly translated into fly-on-the-wall commentary in the manner of the GCHQ adviser, so that the RealWorldPresent expert notices not-one-thing - it is suddenly as if the upper-echelon person really is an expert too.
for several yearz now, i've been mucking around with a network simulator called ns for a lot of network research here, and also running it in partial emulation mode - basically, ns mimics the Internet protocol stack by offering a set of classes that fit into a discrete event simulator much as you might expect - it has a topology generator, and a selective trace facility which then lets you run visualisations of the history of dissimulation run.
ns is written in c++ and object tcl, and via a _very_ crude reflective interface, allows the tcl to modify the implementation and behaviour of the c++ level (and vice versa); (footnote: reasons are that tcl is good for scripting, so you can quickly modify descriptions of instances of topology or imposed events and other simulation configuration data in that language, while the c++ is therefore "efficiency" reasons (simulating 10^6 nodes in interpreted anything is seriously not likely to get far)
it allows you to interface to the real world in "emulation mode" - an entity in the simulator acts as an "avatar" for the real world ip or end system or traffic object, and via a simple packet filter/gateway, allows on to make experiments that are part real part simulated...
[aside: for reasons of sanity, we've been trying to re-write the whole thing in java ]
so anyhow, what interests me about this is that of course it is a specific instance of mixed reality....and it gives some interesting insights (or might do if i didn't have so much teaching and admin to do) into the sorts of problems faced by systems that attempt to simulate a world with some common ground with reality, and also interface to it....and the first one i can come up with that there are bound to be massive asymmetries - inherent is the fact that the real world is as real as it is whereas there are choices of resolution and of temporal accuracy in the simulated world.....there's not a choice about the rate at which time rolls forward in RL...
So anyhow, in parallel with this, manuel oliveira was working on dealing with simple differences in network, display and other system capability in a shared environment, and it seems that the approach he is adopting (from some of y'all work) can be extended into RL and from RL into cyberia
we'd need to think about a suitable set of mapping functions to cope with interpolation and extrapolation in the simulated environment - easy enough, but how do we modify the behaviour of the users in the _Real World_ _environment_ ??
easy: we do it with mirrors (*) if you have an (imperfect, fairground hall-of-m*) mirror at the gateway between virtual and real, on the real side, it shows the real user how they look to users in the simulated world - this can be done in a lot of ways - its certainly well known that yo can get people to behave differently by showing them what (you want them to think) they look like.
hmmm, programmable mirrors, eh? whatever next?
* of course, this idea was originally had by Jean Cocteau as a way of visualising the gateway between Earth and Hell in his visionary film Orphee (1949) which also features some very neat use of poetry as code...