“Human Uber”
Feeling tired to go to some events but your physical presence is important? Let the "Human Uber" attend it for you!
Although the company or organization that make this has not been established while this is still a fresh idea from Jun Rekimoto in EmTech Asia just 2 days before this blog post is submitted, I think someday it is established, they will be a winner, if only they are moving fast enough.
ChameleonMask is a prototype of “human uber” that reminds me of one journal that I read: When we are reading Emoji, it won’t activate your Broca or Wernicke’s area in the brain which associated with language. Your brain recognizes Emoji as a face expression containing emotional meaning*. That is why it is not really surprising that it feels natural to someone you interact with virtually only with an iPad which rubber-strapped into a surrogate human’s head.
The future of idea development is diverse. It can be developed as a virtual helmet with OLED screen on it or a 3D screen that allows perception as if the head is actually the subject of presence. Or, robots can be developed to replace the human surrogate per se. The development of technology allows human perception to engage with this communication and eliminate the unnatural sense.
Imagine if we can do this from Boston to attend our conference friend’s wedding party in Chile. The value created in this besides hardware and software is reducing the cost of accident or fatalities, opportunity, and the real cost of transportation, reducing the enviromental impact of it, improving accessibility for users with or without disability, and promoting the shift of human communication trend. With the change on how human communicate while trends are accepting this kind of presence and while technology allows awkwardness to be ignored, lots of opportunities and the human relationship will grow beyond without any issue of where people actually interact.
Further info and sources:
https://lab.rekimoto.org/projects/chameleonmask/
https://twitter.com/EmTechAsia
*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4980471/
This would be incredibly convenient. There is an entrepreneur in NYC named Robert Samuel who established SOLD (Same Old Line Dudes), as a professional “line sitting” service. In 2014, he charged $25 for the first hour of waiting in line, and $10 for each additional half-hour. I don’t think he has an app or a network yet, making scalability hard. But he claims to make about $1,000 per week in NYC providing this service, proving there is definitely a use case! Check him out here: http://www.businessinsider.com/professional-line-sitters-2014-7