23 teams were given 30 hours to propose an idea or product that could effectively leverage this power and flexibility. It's my humble opinion that the presentations that took place Sunday evening were surprisingly inside the box. There were no products that made me or anyone in the crowd just slap our foreheads and say "that's genius." I can hardly begin to critique the performances and ideas of my fellow classmates; the overwhelming time constraints no doubt weighed on every team's ability to effectively brainstorm and communicate anything with particular ease. Our team was no different. It may be of interest to note that the top three winning teams created a dual-screen compact laptop, an OLED retractable (paper-scroll) cell phone, and a dedicated medical monitor.
I felt that this blog has given me an additional opportunity to share our idea with others, as our 'product' is almost exclusively rooted in Human Computer Interaction. Below I've included my portion of the audio presentation, along with a few UI design mockups that I created to help visualize a few concepts we created. Since the theme of our idea (and as we felt, Snapdragon in general) was unified computing, there are a lot of details occupying a single visual space. The following is the last third of our presentation involving this particular implementation:
As Matt and Woody have already said, the power of Snapdragon is its unification. Bridging all aspects of mobile technology will eliminate our limitations and create a much broader canvas for innovators to create.
Where can we go from here? Where are the trends headed in mobile computing? If we’ve learned one thing from the internet, it’s that putting the tools of creation into the hands of everyone is a socially significant and empowering phenomenon.
What types of advantages can a mobile environment bring to this content?
Let’s start with GPS. We can know where we are, and which way we’re headed. What could benefit from this knowledge? Well, let’s take our cameras and give our photos and video geographical context. Well, okay that’s great. We have a way to tag positional data and orientation. Now let’s integrate and transform this into a shared experience.
Imagine you’re on a vacation to San Francisco, and you’re at the Wharf getting ready to take a scenic shot of Alcatraz. You don’t consider yourself to be a professional photographer, so you pull out your device, and with the aid of geographic context, you look up the last 20 photographs that have been taken in that exact same spot. You now have some great ideas for composition, and can even borrow recommended exposure settings that others have used to produce optimal results.
And what about video? Video is still a fairly elusive property in the mobile space. How can we flesh this out? Video exposes a moment in time more fully than a single photograph, but can also be much more cumbersome to film and often requires more cooperation from the subject in a frame. We all know what it’s like to be conscious of someone videotaping you.
Let’s go back to the same example of the user in San Francisco. One way to increase the image’s context would be to include both video and audio for every picture taken; finding a way to utilize “idle time” to increase the photo’s imprint and broaden the context (and candidness) of that moment in time.
Design mock-up for a unified media timeline, or "Life Journal" (click to enlarge)
So we’ve created a new way to experience photo and video by paring it with GPS. A remaining problem is now the question of how to actually use this information in new and exciting ways. This is where THIS comes in. Your own personal timeline, your “life journal” if you will.
Visually construct your life, hour by hour, using all the kinds of content your Snapdragon powered mobile device can throw at it.
Your travel, phone calls, pictures, and video all synchronized and laid out in front of you. What we have here is our mockup of a potential interface for viewing and managing all of this content.
At it’s core, the values of a calendar interface and a map interface are combined. With some form of timestamp, your device can visually trace your day, and mark any particular places of interest.. based on stagnated movement, or other such criteria.
Really though, the most important thing we realized at this point is that there’s no reason to have this one space while we ignore the time-sensitive things we already record. Events, appointments, to-do lists, contact information and more. A fully documented event calendar and to-do list could seamlessly be integrated into this timeline, and even be aware of separate influences inside a specified time frame. If I had a concert planned in my calendar for sunday night, and took a bunch of videos once I was there, I could automatically see my stuff placed into my timeline the next day tagged with “concert” and appropriately sorted.
Example of sharing space and context-sensitive media sharing (highlighted by dots)
There’s no reason that every part of your digital life can’t be a part of your social timeline. And more importantly, there’s no reason why this can’t be shared with anyone else, in the same visual space as your own. If I travelled to school and needed to collaborate on a project with other students, we could work in a virtual space where all necessary media was intelligently combined. To this end, sharing media is nothing new, but sharing it in the context of “space and time” on its own is an entirely new approach.
Unification of services promotes the unification of our lives, and every digital entity that follows us. Snapdragon is the machine that’s capable of driving this kind of collaboration.
This is more or a less just getting into the types of features we were able to pull out of our weekend think-tank. I'll be sure to supplement this with any outlying factors I come across, as well as be more than happy to answer any questions. Comments and discussion are just as welcome!
