Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media delivered a provocative and inspirational keynote address at the PayPal DevCon held in San Francisco last week. One point he drove home was that developers should take advantage of the sensor capabilities of smart phones. He mentioned how a phone can sense the unique gait of its owner; thus how we walk can be used as a biometric authenticator. Or how, when two phones running the same Bump application are touched together, a P2P payment is automatically made. So apps can be developed to utilize the "sensitivity" built into smart phones.
My thoughts naturally turned to apps useful for writers. What novelists and poets do is filter the material world through their senses. So why not an app that sharpens or extends that ability?
A Bluetooth-enabled camera can be attached to the rim of my glasses. My phone recognizes when I pause to look at something and snaps a picture of it. Then my phone is also keyed to laughter, since laughter means something interesting was seen, heard, or said. Any time the phone registers laughter, the phone records the audio of that, and the conversation around it. Finally, throughout the day my phone records my breathing and heart rate.
At the end of the day, the app compiles all this information into a multimedia presentation that I view on my phone before I go to sleep. I see all the highlights of my day, all the interesting things I've seen and heard but perhaps have not really registered because I was too preoccupied or distracted to take notice. The audio and video is cued to a graph of how my body responded to the various stimuli over the course of the day.
In the end, this biofeedback loop helps me experience my day with more clarity than I brought to the initial experiences, and maybe I fall asleep realizing how rich my everyday, humdrum life really is. An app like that couldn't help but enhance my capacity to experience and recall the world. It would ultimately result in better writing.
When many of the apps developed for mobile devices end up distracting users from the real world, my "Shakespeare" app would do the opposite. Anything to make my morning commute a little more interesting.
When many of the apps developed for mobile devices end up distracting users from the real world, my "Shakespeare" app would do the opposite. Anything to make my morning commute a little more interesting.
