UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: In some languages, there are several variants of words (like “this” or “that”) that give you additional “implicit” information about the world. For example, if a person says “this notebook,” it indicates a notebook that is near them. If they say “that notebook,” it indicates a more distantly-located notebook. Even though a language can…
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Background: Some animals communicate at frequencies outside of the normal range of human hearing. For example, bats are constantly flying around and emitting shrill echolocation “pings,” but humans typically can’t hear them. Proposal: Electronic hearing aids have existed for many years, but they’ve always focused on enhancing hearing in the normal human ranges—no one has…
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Background: There are a number of YouTube exercise-routine channels where the presenter demonstrates some sort of activity, and you, the viewer, are encouraged to contort your body into the same position. The Issue: Humans are quite bilaterally symmetrical. If a yoga presenter is facing sideways, it’s not always extremely obvious which arm / leg is…
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Background: In some languages with non-phonetic elements (e.g. Japanese kanji), there can be additional phonetic annotations above the symbols (Figure 1) to clarify the pronunciation of a non-obvious word. This is particularly useful for students, and for clarifying the pronunciation of rare words. Proposal: Strangely, the English language does not frequently employ this style of…
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Background: Cars have a lot of instruments. These typically indicate the car’s speed, the current gear, and various other qualities of debatable utility. Nowadays, cars have all sorts of additional sensors (potentially including LIDAR, cameras, GPS, etc…), but the dashboard instrument panel has not changed substantially since about 1950. Proposal: Let’s add a new indicator…
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Background: People who do not live in a jungle frequently associate the “sounds of the jungle” (e.g. the noises of birds and other miscellaneous creatures) with a sort of exotic and faraway mystique. Proposal: This idea is already used in theme parks, but there’s no reason we can’t apply it everywhere: any business that has…
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Background: According to the American Dental Association, the “general” recommendation is for people to brush their teeth for two-ish minutes, twice a day. The Issue: Two minutes is a long time! Maybe there’s some way to motivate people to brush their teeth for this long. Proposal: The incentive is simple: two-minute videos that are only…
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Background: One of the various promises of “augmented reality” (or “AR”) is the ability for a user to wear a virtual reality headset that edits reality in some vaguely useful fashion. For example, a maintenance worker might be able to overlay a diagram of the wiring inside walls, giving them a sort of “x-ray vision.”…
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Background: Every year, tens of millions of coloring books are sold to children and adults alike. The Issue: Filling in a coloring book can be quite a time-consuming process. Even with frantic scribbling and thick markers, it’s a slow process to fully color even a single page in a coloring book (Figure 1). Proposal: Thanks…
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