So I was watching all these people run around the floor at ETech, and it was really fun to watch their interactions from a distance. Sometimes people were really excited to talk and share, sometimes they hid behind their laptops but seemed eager to start a conversation, and sometimes they busily ran from place to place. The issue, of course, is that the people who are in the space designated for talking weren’t always eager to do so, and the people who were off to the sidelines might well have been super-happy to start up.
With this in mind, I want to make a wearable that emulates (in both look and function) an iChat/AIM/Gtalk/whatever icon. It would have a very simple user interface: are you busy or available? If it’s the former, your icon turns red and people will know not to talk to you. If it’s the latter, your icon is green and you will be welcoming conversation.
Idle may be a bit different here than usual, but I think there’s a way to solve it: put a small mic in the unit. When you’ve been available for a while but not talking to people, you’ll be viewed as “idle” and your icon will turn yellow-orange (as it does in most chat programs as well). I’m still figuring out if, for both circuit complexity and logistics, it makes makes more sense to have an accelerometer to detect when you’re moving, but then again you don’t always move a lot when you’re having a conversation. Have to do a bit more research before I get that ironed out.
The deeper issue is the same as the one that affects online chat ettiquite — some people say they’re away when they’re not, and others say they’re available when they don’t actually want to talk. As of yet, I don’t have the best solution for that, but I think studying actual chatters may fix that up a bit. It either involves a more complicated set of options for the user (and we all know that unnecessary complications are a very bad idea)
The next stage for these might be to include (you were waiting for this, weren’t you?) an XBee radio so that units can talk back and forth, letting users set a “busy but not really” status that shows them as red, but your unit would turn them green. It would also help to solve the back-from-idle issue. Maybe. It’s something to consider, anyway.
(This is so, so not helping my thesis, is it?)
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