[ Changed the subject, for we've veered off-topic. ] pike wrote: > So, what did science fiction *miss* ?
Actually, very little :) One thing that could make voice telecommunication a lot more attractive would be an avatar who "listens" and "understands". Voice mail makes many people uncomfortable because they don't get none of feedback that normally accompanies a conversation. Even voice telephony has that kind of problem to some extent, particularly with large end-to-end delay. A possible improvement would be some sort of avatar that provides these clues and fools the speaker into feeling as if he or she was talking to a real human being. Determining how all this might work would need a bit of research, though. TV fakes continuous motion, MP3 fakes a loss-less reproduction, so I wouldn't be surprised if we couldn't fake a human listener as well with less effort than dragging a real human to the phone. Okay, that's a far-out idea. Something closer to home: if you don't need video telephony, you don't need rapidly updating color images. So, put e-paper into those phones. Maybe even the well-established grayscale type. It probably still updates quickly enough that you could even doodle on it. Oops, have we just eaten a big chunk of the e-book reader market ? So sorry ;-) As an added bonus, you can get flexible e-paper. I don't know how much abuse it can take, but maybe you could hide something that gives tactile feedback under it ? Wouldn't a touch screen that feels as if it had real keys be nice ? > I've always been amazed by the 1-on-1 nature > of phone calls. Oh, that's been solved already. Even GSM supports multi-party calls. - Werner _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community