Passive data sharing in meat space, help me make it happen

May 28, 2009 1:28 PM

I am seeking to build/buy a device that I am not sure exists, can you help me figure out if it already exists or give me pointers on technologies I could use to build it. See inside for description/specs of what it would have to do.

The device would be a way to share passively information about yourself in "meat space" that is while you walk around.

Using either RFID tags, tiny radio transmitters, or "something else" this small device would allow you to broadcast passively (that is it is always on) selected user entered data about yourself. The device would also be able to talk with other identical devices to read the data off of them. In essence it reads data from others like itself, and pushes out data from itself. It would also be able to tell you when data you specified matched data on another device.

For instance if you were to use it in a dating scenario you could program in your likes and someone else could program in what they are looking for and if the two matched it would let you both know.

It could be used to sell items, to look for items to sell, for "adult" uses, for secret clubs, etc.

two questions:

1. does something like this already exist
2. what technology would you use to try and built such a thing


Other things to think about

RFID tags have pretty limited range

Open source would be better (I can think of a million user driven implementations for this)

Arduino, and other hackable hardware might be useful

I am pretty good with electronics, and know a bit about programing, and have friends who are even smarter than me so we might be able to mock up something

I am not made of money, but would be willing to spend a bit on this (several hundreds of dollars)

posted by stilgar to computers & internet (15 comments total)

This sounds a bit like the bluetooth-flirting that came up awhile back. In any case, the first thing that comes to mind is some collection of widgets that can organize into a mesh of some sort whenever two or more of them come into range of one another. Once they're meshed, I think you're pretty much there - the rest is working out what to say over the network, and to whom.
posted by jquinby at 1:33 PM on May 28

People have done this with clothing, and you're not the first person who has wondered about how to do it via electronics: http://www.metafilter.com/62994/An-orange-hankie-in-the-right-pocket-means#1766735

RFID would be great for uniquely identifying someone, but that's about it. Bluetooth would be good for information exchange, but since you mentioned Arduino, maybe Xbee?

You'd need some kind of data standard to describe what you're exchanging, so welcome to DTDs or something of that ilk if you're hitting XML. No Schematron!

Of course, the privacy handshake would be, heh, fun. I'm already thinking of unpleasant ways it would be subverted.
posted by adipocere at 1:35 PM on May 28

...I'm thinking of a portable version of something like these.
posted by jquinby at 1:36 PM on May 28

I had the very same idea about ten years ago. When Google maps came out, I thought it would eventually evolve into something similar.

Perhaps the iPhone would be the perfect platform? I would have thought the tools were out there. XML, GPS, LANs, WiFi, Bluetooth, Google...
posted by run"monty at 1:38 PM on May 28

Here is one I've used before (not my photo but I was at the event). The devices would give you basic info about the other person (customizable) and would signal you when there was some overlap ("I know John and you know John," "I live in NYC and you live in NYC"), or I believe could be configured to simply alert you when you were near someone you hadn't yet made a connection with.

Check out smart badges, sociometric badges, or ntag.
posted by cocoagirl at 2:06 PM on May 28

I worked for a company that wanted to make a hardware device like this, but the technology wasn't up to snuff so the project died quickly. It also struck of a s dumb business model, since the product is almost by definition useless until it's popular, and won't ever be popular until it's useful. You need an overnight market, and good luck with that.

These days, I think I've seen iPhone apps that do this already. I had no real interest so I didn't try any out, but all the parts are definitely there.

Whether they match the feature set you list or not right now, though, I do think cell phones are the right way to do it: everyone already carries one, and they can run fancy software to do all you list and more. They are essentially "free", instead of hundreds of dollars, and the adoption/spread rate would be orders of magnitude simpler.
posted by rokusan at 2:13 PM on May 28

there's the Poken which are (annoyingly "cute" and), as I can gather from a quick skim through the site, similar to your idea.
posted by _dario at 2:33 PM on May 28

This is easily implementable, but there is a huge issue of exploitation when you're sharing information wirelessly between devices without any form of security/pairing. It'd be trivial to harvest all information from everyone freely as well as spam matches/connections.
posted by wongcorgi at 2:42 PM on May 28

I think it might be worth pointing out that the device you want is useless unless lots of people have them.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:05 PM on May 28

I worked for a company that wanted to make a hardware device like this, but the technology wasn't up to snuff so the project died quickly. It also struck of a s dumb business model, since the product is almost by definition useless until it's popular, and won't ever be popular until it's useful. You need an overnight market, and good luck with that.

Actually these things were a fad in japan for a while. I can't remember what they were called though.
posted by delmoi at 3:45 PM on May 28

Delmoi: lovegety.

If I were implementing it today, I'd use one of the cheap all-silicon transceivers like an nRF24L01 or an 802.15.4 chip. Broadcast a short packet a few times a minute with your unique ID and a generation number. If it receives an (id, number) pair it doesn't know about, it directly queries that device for all its info. Add authentication to taste.
posted by hattifattener at 4:00 PM on May 28

The ideas been tried a few times, Mobile Phones with Bluetooth seem the current favoured way of implementing it, check out Mobiluck, which claims to have over a million members and is the closest to anything like success. Nokia tried to do the same with Nokia Sensor, but I think it just died - it would be interesting to know why, since it looked pretty smooth. The Japanese device was called the Lovegety - for more, have a read of this academic treatment of the phenomenon. That paper claims that a gay version, called Gaydar - of course, was released in the US sometime after 1998, but I remember a French version advertised in Paris in the mid 1980s.
posted by grahamwell at 4:12 PM on May 28

The School of Information has been working on and off on a project called "Talking Points." Basically, they're developing a device aimed at the blind (and others) for announcing things in meatspace. Sounds like there would be some technological overlap with what you're contemplating.
posted by GPF at 7:59 PM on May 28

...that would be the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
posted by GPF at 8:00 PM on May 28

...and here's better link for Talking Points.
posted by GPF at 8:01 PM on May 28