I can remember hearing about something obliquely similar to this a long time ago... a little device that fit in a jacket or shirt pocket and attached one or two electrodes directly to your chest. The device stored your business card-like information, including a photo (maybe). When two people wearing these shook hands, they made an electrical connection between their two devices and business cards and photos were automatically exchanged. For some reason I remember that the research was done at IBM, around 10 years ago...

Edited by author 04-29-2003 02:17 PM
Wow, geeks need social prompting.

Perhaps they can simply core dump their lives into a memory chip that can interface with other people's memory dumps in other chips and you won't have to leave the house. Your avatar can go out and lead a rich social life while you stay locked in your computer room looking up Anime pr0n and playing Command and Conquer...

Chuma: That was done at MIT a few years back. They have a tech lab that's kind of an incubator for far-out ideas, and this was one of them that kinda made sense. The electrodes were in your shoes, and when you shook hands it completed the circuit allowing the info exchange.

Anyway, here's my invention to facilitate conversations:

I've invented a beverage that, once imbibed, lowers the consumers' social inhibitions, making him/her more open to social interaction and generating a more assertive demeanor on even usually meek people. This new beverage comes in a variety of forms, with a type to fit almost any social situation from a high-priced form served in crystal glasses to less expensive form that can be served from massive aluminum drums (perfect for collegate gatherings). I'm writing the US patent office right now.

Ultimately the purpose of gatherings will be to introduce my tag to your tag. What if my tag hits it off with your tag but I don't like you? Will we have to have drinks together while our tags compare notes?

Dishonesty will abound. Folks will program their tags to "mirror" the interests of others. You're interested in animal husbandry? Well, small world! Me too!

I remember the PARC article on "ubiquitous computing" when it was first published. I recall that Xerox employees resisted the experiments when they discovered one of the badge's functions was to track when they were away from their desks..in the BATHROOM. There were actually sensors in the bathroom, any Xerox employee could locate any other employee on an interactive map, so you could see who was taking a dump in which bathroom, and how long they took. Xerox defended the project, the system tracked people's movements everywhere in the building, not just in the bathroom, this was just an incidental use they didn't anticipate, an anomaly of data gathering. The eventually had to remove the bathroom sensors and listed people in those areas merely as unavailable.

Lovegravy, chuma--the idea was based on media lab work that was then taken up by IBM. The called it a Personal Area Network and it would have transfered business cards during a handshake among a lot of other supposedly useful things.

This strikes me as a dumb and dehumanizing idea. At best it's an icebreaker. Can you imagine being approached by someone only to have them pass you by when his tag told him you weren't of interest?

I seem to recall this same gadget from Peter Hamilton's scifi novel "Fallen Dragon." It was basically used as a singles bar pickup tool. The bars handed them out at the door. You would list your fetishes and when someone who shared them got close, you got an alert.

I remember thinking "thank god technology has not fallen that far."

Ah well.

From the site:
nTAGs communicate with the central server through the radio system, which uses a highly-reliable, short-range technology called RFID (radio frequency identification). The RFID system provides location detection, scans data off the tags, and downloads data into the tags.

The central server holds the master copy of all the participant profile data. The server also collects data that is scanned off the tags and serves as a control station for managing nTAG applications.

Has anyone read Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko" from A Good Old-Fashioned Future? To push the bounds of what these tags are meant to be used for, imagine a central server which tracks what user Bob needs (say, a pack of diapers), and has Alice pick it up at the store before she gets to someplace where Bob is going.

John: I seem to recall several years ago that teens in Japan had tamagotchi-like devices which would do exactly what you just described.

I remember reading about the PARC tags and thinking, what a great idea! You'll always know where to find someone, or you'll always get a call routed to the phone closest to you automagically, and you'll never have to actually type a login username or password on a workstation.

When I originally expressed my enthusiasm for [the locator aspect of the tags], I got a lot of responses similar to the ones here: there's no more privacy with a system like that, I don't want people to know how long I take in the bathroom, sometimes I just want to get away from everybody, etc. This completely baffled me, and it still kinda does.

What do you care if there's someone concerned about how long you take in the bathroom? People have to go, sometimes people take longer than others, that's human nature. A workplace isn't somewhere you go for privacy, you go there to do a job, then you go home. And honestly, how much privacy do you get in the workplace now?

I like the idea that someone might be able to track me down where ever I am. If I don't want to talk to them, I can always tell them to go away (or, I can go home). I also like the idea of tags automatically syncing data; it would be great to be able to just sync my work activity to my manager, and not have to worry about writing a weekly status report. And if my housemates want my tag to coordinate with them and have me run some errand or something before I come home, it would be convienent to xfer it to my tag, but I always have the option to ignore it.

I guess I don't understand - what's the horrible bit about these again?

A similar device could store contacts. Two wearers would be told how connected they are to each other, Six Degrees of Separation or Friendster style. "According to my tag here, you know someone who knows Bill!"

I suspect the Xerox employees didn't expect to have their bathroom habits tracked. You know what happens when management starts measuring something, eventually someone would start tracking who wastes the most time in the bathroom. Or at least, they COULD. I guess you'd have to ask the Xerox employees how they felt about it.
I remember seeing early phone systems that tracked roving employees, I worked at a company that considered putting one in, way back in the early 70s. The employees wore small transponders about the size of a pager, a little radio antenna on each phone pinged the employee number, whichever phone was closest to the transponder started ringing and completed the call. I thought that was really cool.

Socially, I think this is a really nifty gadget but in and of itself, not worth much of anything in the long run. I mean, the fact that two people share a common interest or know someone in common is no guarantee that they'll get along. The fact that Joe Doakes and I both like Monty Python and poetry won't amount to anything if he's also a staunch Republican to boot.

But the fact that this gizmo strikes me as a very low-level, cheap palm-style computer makes me think that this would be great as a limited range messaging tool. I'm not that interested to find out, in the crunch of a cocktail party, that Joe Doakes is from Butte Montana and likes curling, but if we hit it off and are both stuck in the "WiFi, HiFi & SciFi: WHY?" conference, networked commiseration could be pretty cool.

It also might have a use as some sort of performance art project, but for anything I can come up with that you wouldnt need anything more complicated than a bag filled with numbers or something like that *shrugs*

Wow. A name tag that does the same thing any Bluetooth or IR enabled device can do. They should really corner the market until we have plenty of IR or Bluetooth devices available.

Oh. Wait.

The somewhat-similar Japanese gadget was called a "lovegetty."

Al Weiss gave a presentation at Walt Disney World last year about "future guest interaction" (my words not his...) He talked about the plan for about 5 years from now where a family walking around would have some sort of device that would signal the nearest Castmember (park employee) so the CM could walk up to them and know their names and hometowns and what rides they've been on. This is supposed to help the CM "assist with planning the guest's day," but it sounds a bit creepy if you ask me. I'd rather have someone ask "So where are you from?" than "Hi Carl from Atlanta, did the Tower of Terror scare you?"

Maybe the world would be a better place if we randomly switched tags, and learned about our differences. Hey--we wouldn't even need tags to do that! Nah--bad for the economy.

If the formula that determined your profile were sufficiently complex it could be interesting and useful.

I'm thinking Meet Market. Cozy up to a potential at the bar and find out that she/he doesn't do ???. More than likely you'd be sitting next to some old guy whose tag says Hi I'm Ginny, I'm 14....

I've been waiting a couple of years for this sort of thing to become cost-effective. I can't wait for a Worldcon name badge with this sort of functionality!

Who invented lovegetty ?

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