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?