Feb 26, 2020
Ashley Opheim / ‘Aura Pixels’ / I Am Here
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Ashley Opheim / ‘Aura Pixels’ / I Am Here
How Calm Tech Principles Are Shaping Both Our Homes and Our Screens in 2025
In a world saturated with notifications, screen time, and digital noise, there’s a growing desire to tune out the chaos. Enter: Calm Technology. Originally conceptualized by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in the late 1990s, calm tech focuses on designing technology that informs without overwhelming—tech that blends seamlessly into our lives instead of demanding our constant attention. Discover…
Pebble’s New Core Competency is Alexa
Smartwatch company Pebble integrates Alexa into its wearable, Pebble Core.
Last week the smart watch company Pebble announced a Kickstarter campaign for a new device that has no watch face and lives on your key ring. While optimized for exercise (it streams Spotify and quantifies your run) the Pebble Core also can be retooled easily to perform a variety of different functions, limited only by the apps that developers might imagine. Buried in the company’s Kickstarter pitch was one of those ideas : “Add a Bluetooth or wired headset to create an always-on walkie-talkie or personal voice assistant.”
The italics are mine, but today Pebble itself is boldfacing those last few words, by announcing that the Core will integrate the capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa super-bot.
In retrospect it’s kind of obvious. Pebble has been upfront about its broad vision for the Core, and while its pocket gadget has no microphone, a simple mobile-phone earbud or Bluetooth headset enables two way voice interaction. And Amazon is the logical choice for the first partner. So far Alexa — an ecstatically reviewed voice portal to “skills” like buying stuff on Amazon, reporting the weather, buying stuff on Amazon, tracking baseball scores, playing music, and (did I mention?) buying stuff on Amazon — has been closely associated with home-grown devices like Echo or Dot. But the company has been vocal about opening its API’s so other devices will speak with Alexa’s voice. Since Pebble is one of the most popular wearables on the market, its announcement carries some weight, and when it ships next January, will be among the first body computers on the market to integrate Alexa. (Right now, the only third-party device using the Alexa Voice Service is a kitchen-based display called Triby. According to Amazon, Ford is considering integrating Alexa in cars and another smart-watch company, Co-Watch, is planning to build the bot into its product.)
As for Pebble, it turns out that adopting Alexa is an evolution of a preexisting strategy. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, who is 30, has been obsessed with the potential of wearables since he founded what is now Pebble in 2008. He understood, years prior to Apple entering the field, that only imagination bounded what such devices could do for you. Given that, it’s not surprising that well before working on the Amazon integration, Pebble has been working to imbue its products with the superpowers of a omnipotent assistant-bot ...
Pebble’s adoption of Alexa may not be a major milestone in the increasingly competitive intelligent assistant war, but it shows how Amazon, without a popular operating system of its own, can propagate its bot into the hardware topology of the Internet of Things. Apple and Google are making it easy for Amazon by keeping their system relatively closed. (After Google announced its Echo competitor Google Home, Migicovsky marveled at its lack of an open API for devicemakers like him.)
For users, the story may not be as rosy. Why shouldn’t the devices of our choice have the bots we prefer? Maybe gadgets in the future could accommodate a gaggle of automated assistants, all poised to answer the call when the proper trigger word is uttered — OK Google!, Hey, Siri! Viv, are you with me? (Privacy advocates may shudder at the prospect of multiple services open-miking us, but that’s another story.)
Read full story here.
SXSW: Amber Case keynote
Amber Case, the co-founder of Geoloqi.com and a cyborg anthropologist (cool!), talked about ambient location and the future of interfaces for Sunday's keynote at South by Southwest.
Case said that using your smartphone all the time makes you a cyborg. She said we're creating walls of information (if printed out) via Facebook, which she said is similar to what the ancient Egyptians did, but we're not archiving the way they did.
"All of this is hanging there in mid-air or in the cloud somewhere" as opposed to carved into stone. She said we all become paleontologists in a way because we're digging through content (think of searching through your email) to find information.
She said we also have "information jetlag" because we interact on Twitter, with text messages and emails, etc. "When you put this all together, you kind of panic," she said, showing off a screen grab of her inbox with more than 20,000 unread emails after her TED talk last year.
"Every time I look for what the future, I look to a research institution that has a lot of funding and time," she said. She talked about Steve Mann, an inventor who was one of the pioneers of augmented reality. He created a heads-up glasses display years ago that took video of the world around him and then allowed him to alter it (in his case to make billboards and other advertisement say whatever he wants the to say. He also used a "Twiddler" to type.
He also used "computer-mediated reality" for facial recognition and history so he could remember names (something I could use).
"It took a very long time to reach everyone's pockets, but it is not yet heads-up displays," Case said. "It was really expensive and difficult to use" until recently, she said.
She said Flipboard makes her happy because it's a "superhuman interface." - it reduces the time it takes to get to the information.
She also showed off a massage vest, which you wear and as someone plays a video game, it causes you to get a massage. I think this might save some marriages.
She talked about Calm Technology, which was looked into in the 1970s by Xerox PARC in California. The idea is that your natural actions become input. As an example, she talked about the Haptic compass belt. You wear it, and it buzzes in the direction of North. What do you do with this? It helps you get around, and it gives you a new sense of direction without looking at a map. If you hook it into GPS, it can buzz you which way to go when you need to turn. "It's compressing a video into another sense. It shouldn't be in the visual space."
The ambient location part of her speech was about getting use out of your phone without spending time staring at your phone all day.
As an example, she said her co-founder was capturing his location and speed every 5 seconds of every day for quite a while using GPS. What can you do with it? Case said you could leave a message in places, and when you get to that place, you get the message (sounds like Siri's notifications system). You could put a "geofence" around the house, so when you get home, your lights turn on because your phone tells you that you're home. "The phone becomes a remote control for reality," she said.
Another use, she said is to have your phone tell you when you're at your bus stop and when to get off. "That sort of thing - where you're using this in the background so you help your life and you don't have so much intensity in life by staring at a screen all your life."
She talked about an app created as an experiment in Portland that knows when you're waiting at a bus station and buzzes you to tell you when the next bus will be there. Another gives you all the Wikipedia articles around you as you walk through a city. The interface is set up to behind the scenes, so you don't have to think about loading the app and asking it questions, like Google. Instead, it just know when you're at a cool spot and pushes it to your phone.
What keeps all this tech from reaching the mainstream? Battery drain, she said. When you use location-based apps, the battery dies quickly. Another problem is there are several platforms, and it's hard to develop for several platforms.
She said the next generation of location is in the background, doing things to help you and the above problems would be solved. So she created Geoloqi to try to solve the core problems.
She announced they are partnering with three companies to make this happen.
* Appcelerator - They have a toolkit for developers and 1.5 million users.
* Factual - She said you need context and data, and Factual has 60 million data points around the world.
* Locaid - They have access to 350 million devices in their network.
"The best technology gets out of your way and let's you live your life."
Visions of the future "Incidental Media" by @BergLondon. Love the idea of passive engagement presented here. Access to data all the time without it feeling overwhelming to our senses...
(via Why Microsoft's Vision Of The Future Is Dead On Arrival | Co. Design)