Half-baked Ideas
I've been scooped for the last time. I'm not one to cry over things like this, but it's happening with surprising regularity these days. What follows is pathetic wallowing in my own tears. I'm just going to blurt out all my ideas so I can do a "see, I said it back then". I claim no originality in these ideas, as it's obvious many people come up with them independently. In the open-source spirit of things, anyone should feel free to use these ideas.
1) City as canvas. Some of the first talk of digital paper got me thinking about it. I figured everything would be covered in DP when it became cheap.. sidewalks, streets, buildings, clothes, etc.. Even better, these surfaces would be wired up to the net.. finally making use of the supposed 1k IP addresses/square foot that IPv6 is supposed to give us. For what use? P2P Advertising, of course. Use your video-cell phone, visit the GPS-located webpage for the wall you're standing next to, micro-pay for 5 minutes of time an hour from now, record your marriage proposal over your phone, play it back on the wall for QA, and then show up later with your soon to be wife.
2) Star-booths. I live near a park. It's really a lovely place.. largely maintained by the neighbors, not city-hall. I'd like to give something to it. Well, I've been toying with the idea of making a "star booth". Take Celestia, a laptop computer, microphone, some as-yet-non-existent voice-recognition program, a digital projector, and some cleverly shaped/coated clear hard plastic. Rig it all to be a domed booth. The computer is closed, but running celestia. Run the video-out to the projector, which projects up at plastic dome. The dome serves as umbrella and screen. Voice commands are used to control a floating, projected cursor. "Left, Right" or "30 degrees declination, ..." until you highlight the object you're interested in. "Zoom" and you see Mars change from a glimmering star to a full red orb which the wonderful Celestia allows you to circle around. Scripts would run when the dome was idle, auto-highlighting "interesting" objects, or perhaps timely phenomena, with 3D models regularly downloaded from the net over the shared wireless in the park.
3) Massively parallel computing -- hardback edition. At CMU, freshmen CS students have a course where you design a CPU on paper out of NAND gates. You build up complex circuits a unit at a time. The professor starts you off with something like a multiplexer, and you get to do the rest.. up to about 4, single byte-wide instructions. Neat course. Anyways.. you're looking at the circuits, thinking how f'ing beautiful it all is, how simple. Then you find out about digital paper. Aha! Why not just print a circuit that really works? You could almost start doing gates as letters in a font. Just type the damn thing in. I have a fontographer friend, and my goal was to blow his mind by showing him a real A-Z font-set that was designed in such a way as to actually compute the words you typed in it, e.g. "AND" would have leads on the left side of the A, and a single output on the right side of the D, and it would literally compute the AND function when electrified. NAND, MUX, etc. etc. And then just use a page-layout program to make a kind of word painting/circuit. Stacks of pages, joined by the spine/bus, all working in parallel. The real trick would then be...
4) Computing as art. Take this a step further by designing a font-set/phraseology/circuit that allows you to write poetry that actually computes something related to the meaning of the poem. Take this a step further and use the phrase-circuit to render graphics also related to the meaning of the poem.
Basically, I thought you'd have a museum installation where you'd have a pedestal with a book on it. The book would be most finely wrought, goldleaf, gorgeous colorings, leather-bound. And plugged into the wall (store the power 'lectrics in the spine). Behind the book on the wall, a large digital paper canvas, gorgeously framed. But no painting. The book has a fine, lacely thread leading to the canvas.
The museum visitor walks up to the book, and opens the cover. The canvas jumps to life. The phrase-circuit on the first page is thousands of word-ops long, each word-op giving a clue to what you are about to see. Perhaps the page is titled "A Starry Night", and the electrified text begins: "The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky...". The image that the page itself describes is then displayed on the canvas, the clouds of the starry night swirling, the stars shimmering. Each page turn computing a new poem, a new lavishly wrought painting. A whole museum of art and poetry in a single installation.
Ah, please, somebody make this.