VR pioneer invents 'illumination-as-a-service' In the wild, early, days of the web, hopes were high that it would spawn or host virtual realities along the lines of those imagined by the likes of Vernor Vinge and William Gibson. One of the most notable aspirants from those days was Mark Pesce, who worked on virtual reality headsets and authored Virtual Reality Markup …
Indeed, it's clear he knows no colour theory either. A small box in the corner of the room that turns blue when it's cold outside is just going to cause you to have a psychosomatic reaction and become cold. Equally, a small box in the corner of the room that starts flashing red when your 'business practices' aren't working well (I assume he means a certain station at McD's has become less productive and the wage-slave needs to get their arse in gear,) is just going to cause workers to become more stressed and less productive.
Hey Reg you missed the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOoKDOv8sd4
After watchng that I can only say in my bestest Dragons Den impression... I'm out.
I would have hoped that the video would give a concise overview of what's so special about it (its 'USP'), rather than being 5 minutes of people doing 'imaginary tits' gestures with their arms.
If they could just nail an end-use or two.... Mathmos, for example, made rechargeable 'pebbles' that could be easily explained as being 'candles but without the fire hazard'.
My goodness, what is this thing all about?
From the video:
"It's called the internet of things, and the light cloud really represents the first internet of things, thing, which people are going to see"
Are these people mental? The best I've gotten from that video is: it has Linux, a router, and a light, which means it can do things. Everyone is jibbering on about "the application" of it and the "possibilities", not one of them goes into detail about what those possibilities are.
I've often thought, network wise, of having some illuminated "thing" or other to indicate various network statistics. It would be nice to just glance and know that everything's running, or be able to tell instantly you open the door that something quite minor that you otherwise may not have noticed has gone wrong.
And each time I think of it, I can't think of a reason that a simple web-page or monitor with green/red boxes on it wouldn't do just as well.
The child going to the toilet? After the first time, they really don't know where to go? I can't even think of a sensible use that isn't very specific (and so you'd probably just make it yourself or buy something for that purpose) or so generic that you wouldn't bother to buy a particular device to do it.
His biggest market? Executive toy / flashy thing put in the background while someone reads the weather, for about a week. That's about it.
Hell, I saw a kickstarter for something similar - a "programmable flashlight", which seems about the most hideous waste of computing resources I could ever imagine. This is just the same thing, scaled up.
'most anything, so long as it only requires a source of illumination to be activated as the main crux of the request...
Fkin useless, did this guy fall off the shitter and smash his bonce?
And his start-up coffers..... WTF! how will this item of techno fluffery ever need that much money, how many of the things is he expecting to sell?? I would to see his market analysis model.
Besides, I think Philips already beat him to the punch...
It should be clear by now that the vast majority of projects on kickstarter are;
A) run by people who couldn't put together a proper business proposal and as such have resorted to begging on the internet,
B) over-budgeted so that the project leader will still make some money even if the product completely flops,
C) contributed to by people with more money than sense.
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