Phones
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The Issue: Vertical orientation is the standard for short-form videos, which are optimized for viewing on (tall) cell phone screens. Unfortunately, desktop monitors are wide, not tall. This means the full-screen vertical video experience is suboptimal: such a video only fills about a third of the display area (Figure 1). Proposal: A vertical video aficionado could fix…
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Background: “Incidental exercise” is a term that refers to the physical activity that a person gets during their normal daily routine. For example, a person who lives in an apartment that is three flights of stairs up from the street would get the “incidental exercise“ of climbing three flights of stairs. Proposal: Let’s bring incidental…
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Background: Supposedly, changing a phone’s display to only show a drab grayscale tends to reduce the amount of time that the phone’s owner spends fiddling around on the Internet. Proposal: Here’s a simple software-only hack that would make people more aware of the amount of time they’re spending on their phones, and might give them…
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Background: Hundreds of years ago, a cool looking numeric system was invented for writing numbers from 0–9999 in a single cryptic rune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals. In Figure 1, we see how two such symbols could represent a phone number. Proposal: By making use of these strange-looking numbers, ”boring“ mundane activities—like dialing a phone number—can become more exciting…
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Background: Sometimes, office workers who are retired (or unemployed, or even on vacation) miss certain elements of the office environment. Much of this is probably rose-tinted nostalgia, but maybe we can capitalize on it anyway in order to create a valuable service. Proposal: There are three elements to this system, which we will call the…
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Background: Sometimes, people feel the need to win an argument no matter what, or to “save face” after being totally incorrect. Or maybe it’s the last question at a pub trivia night, and the championship is on the line! The issue: (Un)fortunately, it can be easy to be called out on factually-incorrect assertions (e.g. “I’m…
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Background: Yoga is often thought of as an activity that requires focus, and is thus incompatible with meaninglessly scrolling through random Internet content. And it’s true that most yoga positions do not leave the yoga practitioner’s hands free to casually browse a cell phone while yoga-ing. The issue: Unfortunately, the result of this is that…
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Background: Cell phone interfaces seem to inexorably become more complicated as time goes on. The issue: The 2010-era smartphone relied on a small number of obviously-interactable elements, but 2020’s smartphones are quite sophisticated (and complicated) from a UI standpoint, with finger-sliding gestures, multiple screens of icons, and even the possibility of splitting the screen to…
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Background: When typing on a phone with an on-screen virtual keyboard, the auto-correct feature is essential. Strangely, this auto-correct / auto-complete feature has never been monetized! Proposal: In order to bring great deals to consumers and new advertising opportunities to companies, we describe the following auto-correct enhancement. Currently, auto-correct is boring and predicable. For example:…
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Background: It seems that nearly every electronic device with a camera or microphone is now Internet-enabled and can wirelessly send video and audio to the world. The issue: Due to the preponderance of electronic hardware in a modern household, it can be difficult which (if any) device is spying on you at that exact moment…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 