There exists no shortage of naysayers regarding this particular tech (especially on the video’s YouTube page). The notion of reading electrical impulses transmitted by eye movement for gesture control has long been a future tech darling, dating back to (at least) the era of Firefox (the Clint Eastwood film, not the Mozilla browser).
Clearly, there are abundant opportunities to bring a mature version of this technology to market in interesting ways. I’ll spare you the tedium of enumerating them.
What came to mind immediately, though, was a seemingly lower-tech problem (for which eyeball gestures might well be overkill), namely: How can we apply online following behavior to offline entities?
Online, this is a relatively simple operation. With a name or handle in hand, we can rapidly search for and identify an entity we wish to follow (or friend, depending on the symmetry of the network), and act upon our impulse. In the physical space, however, opportunities are scarce for the engagement of strangers, however intriguing, save for personal introductions or incidental conversation.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you.
The impediments, though, are seemingly small. The proliferation of smart phones would suggest that a great many of us are carrying with us clues to our identities – portable network identifiers that contain information about our social profiles. The combination of something like Bump (with greater range) with an ability to identify other entities (people, and places) within a given space, suggests an opportunity to connect, follow or otherwise engage by line of sight or space (which is, of course, where reading eyeball motion comes full circle).
Is this even desirable? Do we want to connect with or follow strangers based upon action and proximity?
Related posts:
- Mobile Phones and FM Transmitters
- Not if they’re not going to try…
- Ubiquity != Permanence
- Standard Gauge and Cupcakes
- Tweenbots and Stanley Milgram