november-2010

ILLUSTRATIONS © JO BIRD/JELLYLONDON.COM
BIOSOCIAL NETWORKING
A lot of people like social networking –
a lot. There are 22 million users on Skyrock
and more than 500 million on Facebook.
But there’s an inherent problem. “We’re
befriending thousands of people online,
but now we’ve suddenly realised there is an
emptiness,” says brand consultant Martin
Lindstrom. “There is a lack of physical
contact, something that humans are hardwired
to desire.”
By 2025, we could be using the
solution: BioSocial Networking, now being
developed by Tracy Hammond at the
Sketch Recognition Lab at Texas A&M
University. Here’s how it works. You wear
a bracelet, and that bracelet reads and
transmits your pulse to another person
who’s also wearing a bracelet. “The idea
stems from the closeness you get when
you’re physically near another person,”
Hammond told me. “Think of when you
rest your head on a loved one, and you feel
their pulse, and how close it makes you
feel.” BioSocial, as opposed to common-orgarden,
social-networked relationships, will
be much more deep and meaningful, and
help us feel closer to our loved ones, even
when we’re far apart.
SHOPS THAT DICTATE
WHAT YOU BUY
Like in Minority Report? Please. “That’s
not very far away from what we have now,”
says interaction designer Paul Skinner.
But by 2025, shops will be personalised,
just like your phone is. Think about it –
your phone’s hardware is the same as the
millions of other smartphones out there,
but thanks to the background picture of
your dog/child/wife/weekend and loads
of very handy apps you never use, yours is
unique. And so is everyone else’s. That’s
how we’ll experience stores. “The next years
will be about taking personalisation off our
devices and empowering the space around
us with our settings,” Miles Kemp, founder
of responsive architecture company Variate
Labs told me recently.
To make this work, our environments
will have to recognise us and respond to
us. Both those technologies are here now.
As people automatically check in to places
on location-based network Foursquare
using apps such as Checkmate and Future
Checkin, retailers now know when they’re
in the store. And those retailers are working
out how to make their stores respond to
their customers’ personal preferences, just
like Amazon.com does. “It’ll be like having
THE MACHINE
READS YOUR
FACE, AND
IF YOU’RE
HAPPY IT GIVES
YOU A FREE
ICE CREAM
your own personal interpreter or your own
personal shopper with you,” says Kemp.
“If the app knows you are health conscious
then it will highlight products that are
healthy for you.”
FREE ICE CREAM
Right now, computer gamers are getting
excited about “gesture recognition” –
that is, waving your arms about to tell
Microsoft’s Kinect and Playstation’s Move
what to do. By 2025, gesture recognition
will be very old hat. Instead we’ll be
excited about emotion recognition, where
machines sense how people are feeling and
respond appropriately. Not because they’ve
become mind readers – though braincomputer
interfaces (BCI) will be well on
the way by then. But because they’ll be able
to read the little signs that give us away,
such as the words we use, the tone in our
voices, the look on our faces and invisible
cues such as our galvanic skin response.
That’s a measure of our skin’s ability to
conduct electricity, which shoots up when
we’re excited.
A few things are happening now, which
suggest that emotional recognition is set to
become mainstream reality. My favourite
is a new machine that gives ice cream to
happy people. Using a facial recognition
system developed by the Dutchmen behind
GladOrSad.com, Unilever’s Share Happy
machine reads your face, works out how
happy you are, and if you’re happy enough,
gives you a free ice cream. Hands up who
likes the idea of emotion recognition? Or
should that be, say “cheese” if you want a
free ice cream?
BUSINESS | FUTURE 15
15 TH BIRTHDAY ISSUE | TRAVELLER | 71