Phil Smeeton's Tech Thinking Blog

Thinking about the philosophy of virtual reality I'd like us to consider assets like YouTube and in particular ASMR videos. Thinking back to the emergence of ASMR videos we could see that the ASMR artist was creating a virtual reality like experience for the user. So the ASMR videos presuppose in this case that we want VR to be like a version of reality. Other examples of VR like the metaverse promise a more abstract type of reality, a reality where the digital assets are more significant and an accurate simulation of the world around us has less emphasis. Are we seeing a shift in what we value?, possibly, although I think metaverse users value reality as much as non-metaverse users. The metaverse is perfect for users that have grown up in a digital world and value digitally created objects, we can see that the metaverse users will find the more digital and less simulated realities interesting and exciting. Another way of stating this is that the modern metaverse user values the di...

Everyone loves installing the latest app onto their phone, what wonderful functionality awaits the user? When thinking of an operating system like iOS, how many apps should ideally be installed on the device, simple enough question. Well the answer depends on what types of app are installed, for example the types of app we have installed slightly change the utility of the device. If we install apps to control our home we see the iPhone turning more into a remote control device. If the apps are mainly to order food we see the device becoming an ordering device. No problems, well everything is fine until we appreciate the user experience, does an iPhone really make a good controller for home devices? So the main takeaway is that the apps installed on a device like iPhone are influential in terms of  device user experience and therefore the types of apps you have installed matter. Another way of thinking about this is that you can make the iPone a better or worse user experience (in t...

I would like to start by comparing in-person meetings with virtual meetings. During in-person meetings there are a number of opportunities, firstly we have lie detection, whether the humans in the meeting are telling the truth and how accurately they are speaking. Secondly we have the issue of trust, whether the people in the in-person meeting are trustworthy and if so, how much? Both of these aspects are slightly more difficult in virtual meetings than in person meetings. It might be worth building in trust and lie detection systems into video calling applications. I see this potential difference being addressed as virtual meeting software evolves and we might end up in a situation where the virtual meeting can create higher levels of trust and truth detection.

I was chatting to a member of a high-tech organisation recently and they said, 'we prefer the impact of in person meetings versus online meetings at the moment'. I thought that this represents an interesting opportunity to develop the virtual meetings application. The impact of virtual meeting relies on the types of hardware the users have available, for example if someone is speaking the impact is affected by the sound capabilities, this might lead to virtual meeting software adjusting settings like these as the application starts. Another component of the impact of the meeting is using our strongest sense, the sense of sight, for this we are obviously considering the displays of the involved computers. Maybe bigger is better, maybe brighter and more colourful with higher definition is best, also let us consider the impact of VR goggles and the metaverse in this situation.

  Thinking about the role of tech hardware for a moment, particularly the mobile smart phone we can see an underlying philosophy of human thought transfer, and this seems desirable. This post is about the idea of circumventing the human voice and hearing systems and directly communicating thoughts. One potential win of communicating thought is security and secrecy, we usually associate thoughts in our brains to have those characteristics, and there's currently no reason to suspect that our internal thoughts are not secure. Some of the wins of connecting to something like TaaS is for the purposes of intimacy, speed, confidentiality and it is also likely to be discrete.  A service like this is going to require some advanced software to recognise human thoughts and represent them as well as transferring and replaying the thoughts in the recipients mind. The visual mind is interesting here, imagine an apple and imagine sending your mental image of an apple to someone across the ne...

Like many people in the tech community, I consider myself a content creator, I produce content regularly including some premium content. One of the important philosophies of the web is that the quality of the content should be increasing e.g. things are continually improving. To help with this improvement I think some richer analytics will help content creators greatly.   As a content creator there are certain questions that I have to answer (some how). The main question is: What is happening to my content? How many devices, location, access frequency, stickiness, copying, sharing etc I think you get the idea, How do we accomplish this?   My thoughts are that a new sdk and ide should be created for content creation, this facilitates the embedding of meta data into a new type of media file, a self-reporting media file. By self-reporting I mean that when the file is viewed or opened the file itself understands enough about the event to report to an analytics cloud application. S...

When users turn up at a new web site they often like to believe they will be represented using all the values and philosophies that apply to them in other communities and worlds. I think that there ought to be a complex and long term trust building rating system inside Twitter where users gradually and consistently grow their reputation and trust levels by posting content that is valued according to the twitter community. I think it is important that the trust relates to the twitter community, users ought to be able to give and receive credit to other users easily as well as analyse the past history of a user’s reputation. As the user adds posts, they are creating a history of credibility inside the site, this can be reflected by some type of scoring system for others to see.  I think more work ought to be done in this area creating a richer functionality and experience.