Two Talks at Qcon San Francisco: Virtual Reality and Calm Technology!

I’m excited to give the Keynote speech at QCon San Francisco (2016 Conference: Nov 7-9 Workshops: Nov 10-11) this coming week! I’ll be speaking on Monday, November 7th at 9am. This will be both and old and new talk.

What’s new? I’ll be extending an early talk I did on the history of wearable computing by adding an entirely new section on Virtual Reality! I’ve been holed up in Portland’s N Portland VR Lab taking video of all of everything VR, from rumblepacks and in-room sensors to games that shrink and grow depending on how much space you have for them!

Keynote: The History and Future of Wearable Computing and Virtual Experience

Location: Grand Ballroom ABC Day of week: Monday, Nov 7, 2016. Duration: 9:00am – 10:10am

Summary

Miniature electronics and and global supply chains have us on the cusp of a new era of human experience. Early forms of wearable computing focused on augmenting the human ability to compute freely. As pioneer Steve Mann and calm technology pioneer Mark Weiser wanted, “to free the human to not act as a machine”. What does this mean for us as designers and developers, and how can we build interfaces for the next generation of devices?

Who was here before us, and how can we best learn from them? These are the machines that will be a part of our lives in only a few years from now, and the best way to learn about the future is to dig into the past. This talk will focus on trends in wearable computing and VR as it developed from the 1960s to now, and then into the future. This talk will cover various topics on the history and future of wearables. We’ll learn about Ivan Sutherland, human augmentation, infrastructure, machine vision, processing, distributed computing and wireless data transfer, a church dedicated to VR, computer backpacks, heads up displays, reality editing, job simulators and unexplored realms of experience that haven’t yet come to life. We’ll also learn about the road from virtual reality to augmented reality and what we need to build to get there. This talk is for anyone interested in how we can add a new layer of interactivity to our world and how we can take the next steps to get there.

I’ll be giving an additional talk in addition to my keynote! Details below:

Second Talk: Designing Calm Technology

Track: UX Reimagined Location: Seacliff ABC Day of week: Wednesday, November 9th, 2016. Duration: 1:40pm – 2:30pm

Summary

Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is needed? What is not? We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. The terms calm computing and calm technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary.

How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way? How can designers can make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead.

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September and October 2017 Book Tour Dates and Locations

Hi everyone! It’s been a big year for Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. I’ve been working with sound designer Aaron Day on a semi-sequel to it called Designing Products with Sound: Principles and Patterns for Mixed Environments that should be out in October. I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Boston, MA at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society researching the intersection of technology and humans.

Here’s my book tour schedule for the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of new people!

September

4-5: Keynote on Calm Technology. IFA+Summit. Berlin, Germany.

7: Keynote on Calm Technology. 67th International Retail Summit. Zurich, Switzerland.

8: Keynote at Mind the Product. London, UK.

8-11: Free time in London, England.

13: World 50 Conference. NYC, NY.

14: Keynote on Calm Technology. Waterloo Innovation Summit. Waterloo, Canada.

26-29: Conference on the future of AI. Juvet Landscape Hotel, Norway.

October

2-3: Foresight and Trends. Home Studios, New York, NY.

4-5: Fedex Security Awareness (internal event). Memphis, TN.

16-20: SIBOS. Financial Security and Calm Technology. Toronto, ONT.

18: World 50 Conference, NY, NY.

24-25: Media Insights Conf. Rosen Shingle Creek, Orlando, FL.

26-28: Northern User Experience. Manchester, England.

29-31: London, England.

Thanks so much for all of your support over these last few years. Here’s to the future!

The History of the Compass Lifelogging Application

In 2012 Chris Dancy went to Amber Case’s CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. He wanted to show her a project he’d been working on for the last three years, over 600 different datasets of Dancy’s locations, activities, sleep patterns, weight and other data, color coded and synchronized with Google Calendar.

Origins of a mindful cyborg: Case and Dancy at CyborgCamp Portland 2012 and in 2015.

With this much data, Dancy was able to gain an entirely new perspective on his life. He was able to correlate sleep with weight, sadness or happiness, or even the effect of air quality on his driving.

For the first time, all of these different data sets were in one place – the ultimate personal perspective. Case was excited to see this and suggested he show it during an unconference session. Though Dancy was nervous – this was his private data after all – Amber didn’t give him a choice. Case switched the projector on to show Dancy’s work to everyone in the room. The work inspired dozens of questions and a long discussion. Klint Finley, a reporter from Wired, was part of the session and wrote an article on Dancy. The rest, as we say, is ‘Christory’.

Chris Dancy’s lifelogging Google Calendar.

The World’s Most Connected Human

One year later Chris made his way into the larger world as “The world’s most connected human”. He’d stopped smoking and completely changed his behavior, but there was one problem – only he could use his system. It allowed him to see activities in a new way, lose over 100 pounds and significantly improve his life, but the system was an expensive undertaking that required a lot of time and effort. Dancy wanted others to be able to see their lives over time. It didn’t seem feasible or fair that we might need 600 applications and devices in order to understand their lives. With so much data, we run the risk of becoming so connected that we don’t have any time to reflect. Dancy wondered what anyone might be able to do with just the sensors on the phone. Case suggested he find a company in the space and seek their support.

Building an Application

Preview of the Compass app for iPhone.

A few years later, Chris found Healthways, a Nashville-based company with success in the wellness industry and recruited Case to work with him. Healthways invested in the project, and this week, the first results of their collaboration, an iPhone app called Compass was born. Tracking behavior is useful only when you can connect to other behavior in your life. Compass surfaces insights from your phone and shows you how you live your life. Too many hours at the office? Eating right? Flu got you down? Too much phone light affecting your sleep? Compass helps you to see what’s affecting you, and how it affects you. Our vision with Compass is for it to be an interface for your life, and to change your future. In a world of non-stop information, we could all use a bit of reflection – followed by action!

Join the Compass Alpha!

Compass is being made available as an alpha to attendees of the Quantified Self Conference on June 18-20, 2015 in San Francisco, CA. Interested? Sign up for the alpha at existence.io, or stop by our conference booth during QS15 and say hello! Or check out @mycompassapp on Twitter.

Sign up for the alpha!

Where do we go from here?

We’ve tried to distill the best methods and insights from Dancy’s tracking process, but it will take time to get there. We’re looking for feedback and soliciting people to become alpha testers for the app. There are so many non-connected devices out there. It’s not about what you track – it’s about what happens when you tie what you track together. We’d love to know how we can improve Compass to help you understand your life better.

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