How would a pack of eighth graders virtually TP their English teacher’s house?
About twelve years ago Steve Greenspan and I found ourselves asking questions like that. We were thinking about the social interactions of teenagers and how wireless computation might be used as mobile devices became more powerful. We observed and talked to a lot of teens. We needed to build a prototype system to answer some of the more interesting questions.
One technique for answering questions like this is to build a “wizard of oz” system. You somehow convince users they are using a real system when in fact they are just playing with a simulation (there is someone behind the curtain). We quickly discarded the idea. We wanted something we could give to teens and watch how they used it in the wild. We needed to roll up our sleeves and build a prototype or two.
Neither of us are engineers by training - Steve is an experimental psychologist -, but that didn’t stop us. Soon we were puzzling out architectures, designing interfaces, sorting out appropriate technologies, and inventing along the way. It was a nice engineering research project and we made considerable headway over the course of a few months before we added Wayzen Lin, an excellent programmer just out of Columbia, to the team. Wayzen could spend all of his time on the project (Steve and I were about a third time) and the pace picked up considerably. Others (hi Jessica, Dave and Gregg) contributed seriouly interesting ideas that were more than a decade ahead of their time. Soon we had a throw-away prototype and were fleshing out location mapping inside a building, creating geocaches for time dependent information and messages and seeing what worked and what didn’t.
There was also the little matter of a name .. thinking about the eighth graders we called it Air Graffiti.
Over the next nine months a more serous system emerged with an extendible architecture, a more robust messaging protocol, and a brick like hardware prototype consisting of a Compaq iPaq running Linux connected to a GPS and even a head’s up display worn on glasses. Another more useable prototype was just a laptop that we carried up and down the corridors.
The dog and pony shows were the best I've ever seen. Internal and external visitors loved it. Air Graffiti was one of those rare projects that engaged the imagination. Soon we learned to forget about giving long talks describing the technology and our inventions and would just hand people the laptop or Compaq and walk with them. They would invariably start dreaming up uses for it inventing on the fly. I’ve been around many technology prototypes and have never seen such a strong reaction.
A few other researchers became involved and the system grew. Nancy Mintz even created an overlay based on the game engine from Zork. You could interact with the real world and multiple virtual worlds simultaneously. We had all been playing, but now part of it had become a real game.
We started building a version that focused on how machines might make machine to machine communications without people assuming one of the machines was moving. Essentially what does it mean to have a mobile device write a blog.
Of course there were a few flies in the ointment. The company we worked for was in near free fall and was downsizing. The business unit guys could not see a way to make money with the concept and, in truth, it really needed something like an iPhone as a user device. I projected good enough consumer devices would exist in about five years (it took the iPhone six years from the time that projection was made), but that was far too long. Well over a dozen patents were written up, but we soon were out of the company as our laboratory was disbanded and the company stopped pursuing the patents and halted work on the project.
The reaction was probably right given the circumstances, but it is interesting to note the long lead times associated with many of the technologies we use today. I remember playing with multitouch screens around 1990. Five years is a short period - ten or fifteen are fairly common.
Engineering is about working with constraints and creating something that solves a problem. We were looking at social behavior and trying to invent a bit of a possible future. Air Graffiti was a fine vehicle for that, but it was too much of a leap to anything commercial.
It turns out the project has risen from the ashes a few years ago at the same company. I’m very curious to see how it will fit in with the plethora of location services out there today. There is still a good deal of room for doing new things with something like Air Graffiti ... more than half of the areas of interest we identified having been touched by anyone to my knowledge.
There are places that are hotbeds for inventing the future. Xerox PARC and the old Bell Labs, and Watson Labs are classic examples, but they have largely faded. Academia and the national labs still do it and DARPA cheerleads and funds bits of it for the military. But there is often a leap from the original glimmers of ideas to the companies that end up making them practical. Companies like Apple are excellent examples of those who deeply understand technology and bring in what is appropriate at nearly the right time.
But for now I’m waiting to see if a few really neat features from our discussions nearly a dozen years ago turn up on my iPhone. I’ve seen a few of them already and it feels great to see someone do it elegantly.
One of these days ...
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notes
It took more than 100 grams of a high quality chocolate to dream up the name Air Graffiti....
We subsequently abandoned looking at teens and computationally mediated social change. the 18 to 30 year old bracket turns out to be more interesting.
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As an addendum I note our department also was worried about out of band communications. We may communicate mostly in words when we are face to face, but there are gestures, physical feelings and even odors that can be very important. As you might imagine some of this gets strange as the proxies may miss the mark, but it is fun stuff. Asking questions is frequently very playful. It also convinced me that face to face is still very subtle and useful - where it is appropriate happens to spawn another set of fascinating questions.
Here is Fabian Memmert showing some of the work he is currently doing:-)
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