Inventions and Improvements
- Phones should come with a switch on the outside that turns off the ringer. I hate when I'm in a restaurant and I want to turn off my phone so I don't interrupt dinner, but I can't do that without taking the phone out of my pocket and making a big show of it. (This was not my idea, nor is the next phone thing.)
- Sometimes when I lose my phone, I call it so I can hear it ring. But sometimes it's on vibrate and that doesn't work. It would be great if there were a way to call your phone and enter in a code, which would tell the phone, "I don't care if you're on vibrate or silent, ring really loudly right now." The code would be specific to a person (a la voicemail) so other people could not force your phone to ring when you want it on silent.
- The following things should be operable by foot:
- Kitchen faucet, for washing the dishes. It would be super convenient and would save some water.
- Music stand. Ian gave a violin recital last week and in retrospect, I don't know how he was turning pages on the music stand. A foot lever would be pretty sweet. (This idea came out of a conversation with Ian's friend and fellow musician, Jesse.)
- Electronic teaching gizmo for sports. Say I wanted to improve my golf swing. First, we read into a computer what a good golf swing looks like. This technology already exists - it's used to model sports behavior for video games. The way it works (I think) is that the athlete modeling the behavior (say, Tiger Woods) wears all black spandex, except for a few dozen white spots on the elbow, the knee, etc. Then when the athlete takes a golf swing, the computer can read where the white dots move (I don't know if it does so visually or with some kind of sensor).
Now comes the trickier part. I wear a similar spandex suit and take my swing. It would be pretty useful just to visually compare where my white dots move compared to how they move on a Tiger's swing, but we can it one step farther. I have the same white dots on my spandex as Tiger did, but my white dots can provide feedback. If my elbow starts to get out of line relative to how Tiger moved his, I receive a very mild electrical stimulation on the elbow. If it starts to get really out of line, I get a bit more shock (nothing that would hurt).
I could then practice making my white dots move just like Tiger's and I would get constant feedback, even during the swing. One useful addition would be to find a way so that the white dots could communicate "the elbow should be closer to the body" rather than "the elbow is not in the right place." Maybe there could be feedback on a video screen or something.
Even if the varying electric stimulation is not a feasible idea (it does sound kind of crackpot), just displaying that information on a computer screen would probably work pretty well.
- Phones should come with a switch on the outside that turns off the ringer. I hate when I'm in a restaurant and I want to turn off my phone so I don't interrupt dinner, but I can't do that without taking the phone out of my pocket and making a big show of it. (This was not my idea, nor is the next phone thing.)
- Sometimes when I lose my phone, I call it so I can hear it ring. But sometimes it's on vibrate and that doesn't work. It would be great if there were a way to call your phone and enter in a code, which would tell the phone, "I don't care if you're on vibrate or silent, ring really loudly right now." The code would be specific to a person (a la voicemail) so other people could not force your phone to ring when you want it on silent.
- The following things should be operable by foot:
- Kitchen faucet, for washing the dishes. It would be super convenient and would save some water.
- Music stand. Ian gave a violin recital last week and in retrospect, I don't know how he was turning pages on the music stand. A foot lever would be pretty sweet. (This idea came out of a conversation with Ian's friend and fellow musician, Jesse.)
- Electronic teaching gizmo for sports. Say I wanted to improve my golf swing. First, we read into a computer what a good golf swing looks like. This technology already exists - it's used to model sports behavior for video games. The way it works (I think) is that the athlete modeling the behavior (say, Tiger Woods) wears all black spandex, except for a few dozen white spots on the elbow, the knee, etc. Then when the athlete takes a golf swing, the computer can read where the white dots move (I don't know if it does so visually or with some kind of sensor).
Now comes the trickier part. I wear a similar spandex suit and take my swing. It would be pretty useful just to visually compare where my white dots move compared to how they move on a Tiger's swing, but we can it one step farther. I have the same white dots on my spandex as Tiger did, but my white dots can provide feedback. If my elbow starts to get out of line relative to how Tiger moved his, I receive a very mild electrical stimulation on the elbow. If it starts to get really out of line, I get a bit more shock (nothing that would hurt).
I could then practice making my white dots move just like Tiger's and I would get constant feedback, even during the swing. One useful addition would be to find a way so that the white dots could communicate "the elbow should be closer to the body" rather than "the elbow is not in the right place." Maybe there could be feedback on a video screen or something.
Even if the varying electric stimulation is not a feasible idea (it does sound kind of crackpot), just displaying that information on a computer screen would probably work pretty well.