To this point we have primarily discussed the Polyopticon™’s capabilities in general terms in order to illustrate the navigational capabilities it makes possible. Now we can delve into how the technology might actually be formed into a usable product and brought to market.
1) Universal Remote for the one million channel universe
Viewed from one perspective, the Polyopticon™ is a universal remote; it is the channel surfing device that would allow a user the ability to access and navigate one million channels of throughput. It could be a personal, remote device that recalls all your surfing behaviors—it carries your preferences, your viewing history and allows you to build relationships among your passive activities that would provide a greatly enhanced collaborative filtering capacity.
Imagine using the device to organize the universe of feeds into nodes—you can draw them together and classify them break them apart build hubs. When we speak about these navigation activities—build, break, draw together, etc. — recognize that they are intrinsically 4-D capacities. They occur in space and time. And the ability to build those capacities is not possible using current approaches.
Again, the Polyopticon™ provides a temporal-haptic thin client interface device that interfaces with the “poly-virtual back-end” resources – these resources will be more prescribed as we refine the architecture. With this device, you interface with all the potential communication and processing resources in the environment and build relationships among them reflect current observed requirements. It then allows users to review past activities, building inferences and analyzing patterns and making rich, context-sensitive suggestions for new area to explore of ways to optimize experience.
2) The C4I Interface of the Future
Another possible use for the Polyopticon™ could be as an interface for aC4I–command and control, communications and computing and intelligence. It would be a coordination and management environment for organizing millions of streams of information into dynamic, semi-structured and structured informational hierarchies, operating in real-time.
Given current C4 I approaches, each individual soldier in the field provides passes increasing amounts of telemetry back to the headquarters server. Additionally, new approaches to battlefield data gathering now involve millions of sensors providing low-resolution video and other environmental feedback. Managing all these feeds now requires huge rooms of 2-D screens full of analysts that must serially filter and funnel the perspective of the battlefield back to those with accountability for executing the battle plan. This is clearly not an optimal operating mode and constrains the information processing available to a battlefield information system. The Polyopticon™ architecture would provide new approaches for capturing and ordering complex real-time feeds.
A specific example: The Polyopticon™ would allow a leader to capture a 15 minute slice of real-time battlefield information—all the sensor feeds, telemetry and communication – and enable the user to “node” and “hub” and “draw together” information in order to see patterns at they emerge, where decisions were made, and then make further decisions based on a holistic perspective of the real-time face of the battle. Using the Polyopticon™, users can navigate in a full 360 by 360 mode—virtually forward and backward, up and down all over the battle space.
A further capacity that has been envisioned is an interface between the device and semi-circular domed room, where the contents of the cells on the device are expanded to room size. A specialized interface or projector could be use to accomplish this, and would make the individual operator’s perspective accessible to a group in real-time. This would provide 3-D to 2-D translation of what an individual sees and provides an enhanced group analysis and decision-making process.
In other cases, multiple analysts could be working with a device in real-time, comparing and contrasting inputs and feeding information from one user’s stream or process into another. Multiple analysts could share temporal-haptic information in real- and near-real-time at one time. Small groups could step back and analyze and annotate the analytical process.
As we explore this use case, we begin to see the Polyopticon™’s potential as a collaborative device – enabling analysts to share information between devices, incorporating and integrating feeds, streams. They can virtually allow others to see what they’ve seen, and go where they’ve gone and arrive at a common frame of reference in a rich, physical semantic fashion. This is in stark contrast to the current approach, where people step back and write after-action reports that are subsequently passed up the ranks and consolidated, with very little possibility for a real common perspective. Moreover, this reporting process engages only the linear part of their brain and run that down the narrow 2-D pathway. The temporal-haptic sensory environment this makes possible leads to new analytical and reporting capabilities not available from current approaches.
As the Polyopticon™ develops, collaborative capabilities will begin to arise –new types of interactions that take advantage of the temporal-haptic semantic capabilities in a group setting. For example, in this command-and-control setting, one could indicate with one tilt of the device “pass this up to the general” and send along a real-time segment of annotated connections among various scenarios in order to provide a fleshed-out status report. Using the Polyopticon™, such a brief action carries a great deal of significance. Pass, as a verb becomes significant and useful in terms of a design point for exchanging temporal-haptic semantic descriptors among users; a whole vocabulary of such interactive possibilities remains to be created. Likewise this, up and general can have richer context around them—linguistic structures mapped on to physical movements—freeing users from the constraints of making explicit these simple physical and structural activities.
Beyond the military, applications in command-and-control infrastructure across a spectrum of civilian applications can also be envisioned. For example, local first responder units could run simulations based on real-time capture of information. In other cases, control centers in telecommunications, power generation and transportation and logistics could also take advantage of being able to envision large sets of information and scenarios. Other potential applications exist in applications such as health care monitoring and management, weather and climate forecasting and modeling, and air traffic control.
3) The “Bloomberg” of the Future
Another logical application for the Polyopticon™ is as the financial analyst/trader’s workstation. Financial systems are a perfect example of an information-rich environment in which people must construct complex scenarios on-the-fly from numerous real-time streams of information. But when we look at the existing approaches, we see traders sitting in constrained spaces, with systems that consume as much real-estate as possible, but which only provide very primitive means to navigate through this information, and no way to connect it meaningfully.
Constraining high-skill, high-throughput financial workers to interacting only with 2-D data streams using keyboards and a mouse imposes substantial cognitive overhead. Each user must create in his or her mind the full 3-D landing space for all this data, and then must further try to imagine how it plays out over time. They must then transduce all this mental energy back into the 2-D information processing funnel.
Of course these traders and analysts possess the cognitive horsepower to accomplish this; it’s the source of their high value and high compensation. Now imagine taking that cognitive capacity and freeing it up to operate much more creatively–opening the interface into four dimensions, allowing users where people to model and analyze very fine distinction in data, using intrinsic time series capabilities. Further, imagine building temporal-haptic scenarios and playing them back and forward against dozens of virtual applications and data sources, with a very low-overhead access for developing and recalling these scenarios.
Applying the Polyopticon™ in the financial information space opens new pathways for generating value from analyzing massive data sets and massive data streams that the current information paradigm doesn’t make possible. Given that the current option seems to be only to add more screen real estate and more CPU processing capability, then gains will only accrue in a predictable, linear fashion. Breakthroughs in augmenting human cognitive capacities will only occur if we step back and realize that the way you invisible constraints imposed by the existing interface paradigm.
The financial market is a prime area for application. In any data rich environment, where information flows are concentrated, the Polyopticon™ can be a coupler-decoupler, physically modeling decision making processes in ways in that can be built, shared, and extended. It provides the ability to pass along a model for a co-worker to inhabit your on mindset; it models the process of developing your mindset and allows others to share a richer experience of it. You would be able to build a model or a decision-making artifact and have a much richer experience of it; to play it back and forward, annotate and extend it, and then be able to build a library of these scenario-driven modeling and decision-making experiences that would provide a unique set of opportunities. This is a unique capacity that we do not believe exists right now.
4) The Lab Notebook of the Future
The process of collecting laboratory data has progressed little since the basic principles of the scientific method came to be understood in the 17th century. Researchers move along a linear timeline to not results, demonstrating how the evidence gathered either supports or refutes the researcher’s hypothesis. Of course the era of computing has inserted new tools for data generation and collection, and large research libraries are at a researcher’s fingertips in ways never before seen. Moreover, collaborative resources enable a researcher to socialize new discoveries quickly, gathering counter-arguments and suggestions for new angles of inquiry.
Yet when studied from a meta level, the process has not evolved much past the notebook era. Indeed many organizations engaged with research are struggling to evolve beyond the paper notebook as the primary medium for data collection. There is a physical disconnection between the components of the process, and the ability to go back in time, to a significant point on an experimental timeline is done at the cost of physically rearranging the informational state of the data and research materials in order to
The Polyopticon can serve as a researcher’s comprehensive tool for generating, annotating, collaborating, and disseminating experimental information. It provides a tool that enables a layering of information states that can then be played back and examined , literally, from different angles, to gain new insights and perceptions about the progress of a given research program. It enables researchers to return to a significant moment and examine the saved state of data, communications traffic, and other resources extant in the environment. It allows this searching to be conducted freely, and in real-time. The Polyopticon does not involve the cumbersome gathering other of information as it stood at a given point of time; rather, the interface and the process enable manipulation of the time parameter in order to slow down or stretch out a significant moment. In this way, the cognitive state of the researcher can be much more richly modeled, and the dimensions of the new insight or discovery can be recreated for further study and inquiry. The net result is an expansion of research capacity beyond linearly driven and directed activities that has not been achieved before.
5) The PDA of the Future
The final and most obvious use case for this device—the primary case for the development of the product from the outset—is as a personal task management and communications device. This is the real personal digital assistant of the future. It provides a tagalong capture of one’s experience and cognitive processing. Imagine interacting a 4-D tag cloud – with all the added all that semantic, taxonomic, and temporal information. Imagine also the addition of a profile of capacities and inclinations in terms of available resources and tendencies to interact. Further, imagine that also adding things like GPS information; where are they coming from and how did they get there. The Polyopticon™ allows you to build a map or model of preferences and capabilities in ways that do not exist right now.
Looking more deeply at the impact of rich, experientially-based preferences; let us imagine that we used an indexing tool on your personal hard drive. We could find numerous things about you – all your documents, email, chats, songs and videos and web history reveal use patterns, preferences, and background. From a forensic perspective, you could make a lot of inferences about an individual along a narrow dimension, given that a lot of data is available. Of course that artifactual information provides a limited access to really knowing the background context of how things were developed. It is important to note that amassing a quantity of meta-information, while valuable, takes enormous effort in terms of revealing new patterns or insights.
The Polyopticon™ allows you to play back a real-time experiential path through a dense information environment to observe the resources that were at hand for interaction and to observe how content artifacts were defined and refined. It will provide a rich sense of what was happening, where it was happening, and to point toward addressing deeper issues of context, understanding, or motivation in ways that current applications and approaches do not.
The Polyopticon™, as a personal device, provides users the capability to model in unique patterns matching abilities; these abilities are what differentiate us as individuals in an information domain. In terms of interchange processes, the ability to model in all that meta-information: all you know, where you have been, your preferences, and what you’re looking for: all provide a much richer interface with information systems, whether they are part of formal work systems, or in terms of more loosely-defined social interactions.
Additionally, all the meta-information for these sorting and searching processes would be extended into the time dimension; they can be played forward and back to get a richer experience in terms of how a user arrived at given point. This is also a tool that allows you to draw in application resources and widgets and plug in feeds into them in a seamless, low-overhead fashion and then annotate them with rich media and distribute them along multiple channels. The device enables users to draw in all these application interfaces and objects and to work and interact with them appropriately. The net result is a phenomenon in terms of the expansion of human capacity. This device platform – its surrounding operating environment and the supporting technologies that it will spawn – represent a quantum leap in productive capacity comparable to that represented by the emergence of the web nearly 20 years ago.
The prevailing path of technological development has led to a situation where everyone is orienting their information processing environment around media production (e.g., the Youtube/MySpace/Facebook phenomenon.) Increasingly, people are actively capturing, tagging and documenting their lives through information artifacts. But they are doing this in a somewhat fractured fashion; this condition is a function of current technical capabilities.
Because of the unexamined constraints of 2-D technology, the horizon for envisioning the path of expansion has narrowed. The Polyopticon™ represents an opportunity to break down that barrier; it represents the capacity for pro-active capture, amplification and annotation, and multi-channeled distribution of context-imbued 4-D artifacts. It provides a device that intrinsically allows the capture of experience, and provides the user with an interface that allows for the development of highly personal, highly useful tools for generating nuanced output. The device and its operating environment represent a new body of approaches to interaction that is very much needed, and which is not provided within the current paradigm.
6) The Poly-server
At present (2014), there is a niche need for a recontextualized device whose capacities a akin to a desktop. They are “Home” systems, points of contact for all the crossed-streams of a knowledge worker’s world.
The Polyopticon fits hand and glove with its Poly-server back-end. It is constitutive of providing a coordinating spot that provides high resource availability. and the capacity to navigate and manage multiple streams quickly. The Polyopticon device, in an integrated suite with flat displays, projectors, and stationary orientation on a base or other charging platform, provides the ability to sort through a universe of choices, and organize them with a degree of somatic/kinesthetic modeling and feedback. Additionally, the Polyopticon architecture is capable of virtualizing on a mass scale. It can be outfitted with up to an effective 105 cores to process large application streams contained physical-semantic data.
The need that is fulfilled by the dwindling number of home desktops is real. I sit now at a desktop, with large, multiple displays. At my side I have a smartphone screen, and a Pad. It is the work milieu that supports the highest degree of production. And it serves as a sever, connected to mass storage and archives, wired into the switch and router — it is a robust device occupying a central place in my knowledge production landscape. And it is another niche in which the Polyopticon provides novel suitability.