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AUGMENTED REALITY FOR FINGERNAILS<br />
Never did my knowledge of tech allow me to think out of the box more than on the day I<br />
heard a great idea for an app that sent my mind spinning with ways to design its system.<br />
All the ideas that popped into my head sprang from knowledge of available technical<br />
solutions. It happened during a take-your-kid-to-work day at Dow Jones, when I was<br />
asked to help run an activity with the kids for an hour because I work with mobile<br />
technology and the kids love their mobile devices so much.<br />
We gave them all crayons and printouts of an empty iPad and had them draw ideas<br />
for apps. The only instruction was to imagine ways to control their apps using as many<br />
fingers or as few as possible. As an app creator I was really intrigued to see what they<br />
could do with their imaginations. They came up with loads of great ideas, from games<br />
with worlds as rich as those created by the blockbuster AAA video game studios to<br />
homework helpers powered by artificial intelligence capable of slicing through time spent<br />
on the most confounding math problems. Near the end of the hour an eight-year-old girl<br />
came up to present. I projected her drawing to the class and saw an outline of a hand with<br />
all five fingers stretched out, each one ending with a fingernail painted in vibrant colors.<br />
The boys in the class immediately burst out heckling. One yelled a long and loud<br />
“Ewwww!” I responded, “That’s half of all the people in the world you are saying ‘ew’ to.<br />
If you want to make something great, you should appeal to everyone!” Might as well get<br />
them started with UX early!<br />
This point seemed to go over well, because the boys got quiet really fast. The eightyear-old<br />
went on to explain how the app would let people take a photograph of the backs<br />
of their hands and then paint their fingernails in the image. The class applauded and the<br />
little girl went back to her seat. After the session was over and the kids were gone, my<br />
mind was ablaze with all the great ideas they had come up with. Most of them were so<br />
imaginative that the work necessary to make them a reality would be Herculean, not to<br />
mention requiring the Midas touch. AAA video game studios and pioneers of artificial<br />
intelligence don’t come cheap. But the fingernail idea stuck in my head. Would it work<br />
with augmented reality technology, I wondered, to project the images onto your hands<br />
after you’ve finished? Could you zoom in to get a fine level of detail as you decorated the<br />
nails? Was there a library of patterns or multiple kinds of brushes you could cycle through<br />
to make really detailed nail art? Could you save and share your creations? When you<br />
finished, might it be possible to print the nail designs out as stickers for purchase? Maybe<br />
they could actually then be applied to a person’s real nails. When would it be available?!<br />
The idea swelled with potential once the systems capabilities were factored in.
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