Word: borovoy
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...Rick Borovoy, a graduate student at MIT who's a former college classmate of mine, called me at the office the other day with an urgent message. He wanted me to investigate a phenomenon he had observed: the movie musical moment...
...face to face, we could have dispensed with all that tired, wetware chitchat. Our Thinking Tags could have negotiated any fruitful common ground. These tags, the brainchildren of Borovoy and a team of researchers at M.I.T.'s Media Lab, are little wearable computers that can seek out other "smart" tags in a room and swap data. In that way, one can, upon approaching a stranger at a crowded, Thinking Tag-equipped conference, immediately know whether it's worth the brain cycles to attempt social intercourse...
...that there's anything wrong with old-fashioned, sticky-paper hi-my-name-is-squeaky! name tags. "A name tag is a really great piece of technology," says Borovoy, who insists that his team merely wants to help the technology evolve. "Our idea was to build a new kind of tag that tells you something more useful about a person. It's a name tag about us, as opposed to just me; it tells you about our relationship...
...other, pairs of tags sniff and display their results in a neat row of five red and green leds. What happens when you encounter someone who sets off five red lights? Do you turn heel and flee to a more compatible piece of chestware? In the "tag meets" that Borovoy has run, that hasn't been the case. "People are very sophisticated readers," he says. Opposites, after all, sometimes attract...
Fred Martin, a research scientist who works with Borovoy, says the tags have many promising uses. In a large corporate setting, they could help build consensus around controversial ideas. Another project, launched last week, uses the tags to help demonstrate to high school kids how easily diseases like aids can spread. Of course, Thinking Tags have an application that might seem particularly marketable to computer types more comfortable in cyberspace than in boy-meets-girl realspace. "The one that comes up 99% of the time is the singles bar," says Borovoy. "So if you don't mention that...