The Swamp

Ideas!

October 26th, 2005 at 2:42 pm (Arts & Culture, Nerdz0r3d, Ideas)

So here’s the conflict: I have a whole bunch of ideas that I want to write about, but I’m always worried that they’ll get stolen the instant I put them on the web. Then again, my ideas have probably already been thought of before, so they’re likely all over the web anyway. Especially since there are sites all over the place where people freely share their crazy ideas and don’t seem to have any problem with it.

There’s also the issue that, in the event that my death precedes the development of all these wonderful things and they in fact are original, my ideas will be lost to the other side, and I’m not too keen on that. Besides, if I don’t lay claim to these ideas, other people will also come up with them and then I’ll never be able to say that I was equally brilliant. The sonic vibrator, for example, comes to mind.

So here are some of my ideas. Good or bad, I like thinking about them.

1. A targeted advertising scheme based on artificial neural networks. Upon googling, this seems to be a popular concept, which is lame.
   (1 2 3 4 5)
2. A diagnostic program for predicting the success of an ad (using colour, layout, word association & demographic information)
3. A robotic cinematographer that knows where to focus and how to compose a shot based on keyword input from a director and lighting/ sound queues (I think the biggest thing would be teaching it how to direct its attention, and to keep it from composing the same standard shot all the time. Teaching a computer to be creative would be totally cool.)
4. A browser extension for image text recognition (for folks with visual impairments), and various other improvements to talking browsers.
5. An iTunes extension that batch processes selected mp3s and labels them according to their beat rate, which would be useful for preparing songs to go into…
6. …An mp3 player for runners that determines your running pace (the beat rate of your feet hitting the ground) and does either of two things:
   
   1. chooses songs from your playlist by matching the beat rate of the song to your running pace (to within about 10 bpm) and, if you change your pace drastically enough, fades into a new song, or
   2. allows you to choose your preferred running pace (interpreted as the beat rate of your songs), and if you diverge from the pace by too wide a margin, it beeps at you.

   I don’t know about other runners, but I have a hard time regulating my breathing if I’m listening to a song with one pace and running with another. The player would judge your pace by using some sort of clever gyroscopic mechanism, or the same sort of thing that works with step counters. It could also be tied to a GPS locator; the GPS would judge your horizontal vector, and the vertical gyroscopy, steppy-countery thing would figure out the incline. This system could then periodically figure out how fast you’re going and how much energy you’re theoretically exherting, and tell you to speed up/ slow down.