Real-time context aware realities

Contributors: Gene Becker, Kaliya Hamlin, Rich Gibson, Lyn Jeffery, Eric Grant, Jim Schuyler - (as of 3.28.06) Betsy Burroughs, Peder Burgaard, Mark Petrakis

Summary:
Real-time reflective context-aware tools will increasingly shape our behaviors and create fragmented realities that are deeply personalized.


Overview

(Following the 3.28.06 FutureCommons Meeting (BB, PB, MP)

I guess you could say we were taking off from a dead start here. None of the three of us had previously visited this topic.

CELLPHONES were our starting point, presupposing ubiquitous mobile personal devices, which brought us quickly to discussing the pros and cons of such encroaching context awareness.

- PERMISSION – How do we exercise our preferences effectively across an awareness “matrix?” How do we insure our privacy and safety? How do we opt-out of Real-Time Context Aware Realities (RTCTARs)? Who has the remote?

- IDENTITY – Displacing ourselves and our identity/info increases our interoperability as well as our vulnerability to external forces. Inside multiple social contexts, perhaps a multitude of temporary identities is the best defense against unwanted encroachment.

- MISTAKEN IDENTITY is an essential component of STORYTELLING. As RTCARs would obviously affect the dynamic of our relationships, how would they open us up to new means of telling stories?

- GPS TRACKING – Someone knowing where we are physically at any given time has very two-sided overtones.

- INSTANT CONVERSATIONAL MESSAGING - RTCARs would allow us to share a connection with multiple people at once. In this way, we could carry on multiple IM-like voice, voice-controlled text, and video conversations, much like an air-traffic controller does.

- REAL-TIME GROUP ACTIVITIES - Group organizing, group buying, group gaming, or simply keeping track of friends seem an inevitable use of the technology.

- EXTEND MENTAL CAPACITIES - RTCARs could provide us a whole new set of thought augmentation tools. We can see the beginnings of these in current programs like “Devonthink” or “Tinderbox” which attempt to fill in the gaps in our thinking and help us to harness and micro-manage the flow of info that gets through to us, especially out in the world.

- SENSE-GATHERING – Using always on video and audio recording to harvest memories and experiences which when reconstituted could offer a simulation of a real past experience. In a world of infinite bandwidth, we could mark our experiences in such sense-loaded spaces and sub-navigate them by time, place, characters or action.

- A VIRTUAL THEATER OF THE SELF - Where would all this data and simulations live? Are we approaching a time of OUR OWN PRIVATE SERVERS, which like digital skin, will protect us and inform us of any attempts to access our info, whereabouts, or media contents?

- A GLOBAL HEART – In an environment filled with threats that can’t all be countered by defensive technologies, is it possible we will see the emergence of some form of global altruism to balance the excesses of an overheated global brain?

- TIME-SHIFTING (TIVO, etc.) – Signals an escalation in the war for attention waged by advertisers on behalf of brands. Such assaults may prove both a boon or a plague depending on how well they map to our desires.

- OPEN SOURCE – We can expect rapid development of new RTCAR technologies. Who will see them coming? How do we assess their effects and intentions? We can be sure that those looking to seize advantage will become ever more tuned into deploying RTCARs to find us, to pitch us and to hack into our “datastream” for both benevolent and malevolent purposes. Privacy will clearly require vigilance.

(MP)


Thought Leaders

Bruce Sterling:
Objects will be positioned and tracked in space and time, or as Bruce Sterling has coined, "spimes.” See Sterling's SIGGRAPH '04 keynote, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth" and subsequent Wired article, "Dumbing Down Smart Objects"

"A manufactured item may start with a digital blueprint, its specifications and tolerances available online even before it exists. Automated production and shipping records provide a detailed history of the materials and procedures that went into making it. Once it's off the production line, a global positioning system can track it in space and time. Social software lets people critique it, offer advice, and suggest improvements. Ad-hoc networks like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi keep the item and the people who use it in constant communication. And if it was designed for disassembly and recycling, the object can be tracked well beyond the end of its useful life. The future product that embodies these developments will be so radically different from today's that it will need an entirely new name. So let's give it one. Because it's tracked precisely in space and time, let's call it a spime."

Adam Greenfield
Interaction design guru Adam Greenfield's responded in, "Spimed":

"I have a lot to say about the notion of such chimeric object/product/service hybrids, both because I think Sterling's onto something important and real, and because the direction he takes it in worries me. He's got unusually fine and sensitive antennae; as a novelist, fabulist, extrapolator, raconteur and ranter, he's terrific. But as a designer and an organiser of design, oh...let's just say Sterling's taste leaves something to be desired. So when he starts talking about "an imperial paradigm...a weltanschauung and a grand schemata sic?," for designed objects, my ears perk up."

Bruce Sterling
Extends the dicussion further in his new book, "Shaping Things":

"You first encounter the Spime while searching on a Web site, as a virtual image. The image is likely a glamorous publicity photo, but it is also deep-linked to the genuine, three-dimensional computer-designed engineering specifications of the object -- engineering tolerances, material specifications and so forth. Until you express your desire for this object, it does not exist. You buy a spime with a credit card, which is to say you legally guarantee that you want it. It therefore comes to be. Your account information is embedded in that transaction. The object is automatically integrated into your spime management inventory system. After the purchase, manufacture, and delivery of your spime, a link in established through customer relations management software, involving you in the future development of this object. This link, at a minimum, includes the full list of spime ingredients (basically, the object's material and energy flows), its unique ID code, its history of ownership, geographical tracking hardware and software to establish its position in space and time, various handy recipes for post-purchase customization, a public site for interaction and live views of the production change, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update itself in your database, and to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. At the end of its lifespan, the spime is deactivated, removed from your presence by specialists, entirely disassembled, and folded back into the manufacturing stream. The data it generated remains available for historical analysis by a wide variety of interested parties."

John Thackara
Is a design observer and Doors of Perception-ist with this riff on “Shaping Things”:


"Our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. I call them macroscopes. Tools, and aesthetic notions, that help us understand – and act mindfully in – the big picture."

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