Analogue to digital interfaces (and vice-versa)
I have become interested in the number of different ways and gadgets that are appearing which essentially operate as analogue to digital interfaces. Flying back from my holiday (uggghh) I read the SkyMall catalogue which is always good for a laugh. What jumped out to me were the staggering number of devices whose sole job is to translate something in the real world into the digital world and then perform some kind of function on it.
From the USB turntable pictured above, to digital coin counters, to 35mm slide digitizers, to speech language translators, to pen-based scanners, to hand-crank powered radios and flashlights, it feels that there is a macro movement afoot. I already wrote about the ability for the iPhone to play this role here.
Talking about this at ZJ, we realised that this is another reason why we aren’t big fans of Second Life. Most people aren’t after a fully digital second life. Instead what they want is a digitally augmented first life. These analogue to digital interfaces are the first step in being able to layer on a wide variety of innovative services. As more and more parts of our everyday experience become digitized, the possibilities to deliver “augmentation” through services increases dramatically.